MCP donation to Linux Foundation AAIF

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a JSON-RPC based open standard introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 for connecting LLM clients to external tools, data sources, and prompts. The June 2025 spec revision classified MCP servers as OAuth Resource Servers and required clients to implement Resource Indicators per RFC 8707, formalizing the authentication path. By the November 2025 anniversary, the MCP SDKs were drawing over 97M monthly downloads and the central MCP server registry held close to 2,000 published servers, a 407% increase from the September 2025 batch.

OpenAI adopted MCP in March 2025 and integrated it across its products including the ChatGPT desktop application. Google, Microsoft, and other vendors have followed, making MCP the default agent-tool wire protocol across the major model providers' first-party products by late 2025.

On December 9, 2025, Anthropic donated MCP stewardship to the Linux Foundation's newly formed Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), transferring the specification, reference implementations, and trademark to the foundation. MCP was not donated alone: the AAIF also received Block's goose (an open agent framework) and OpenAI's AGENTS.md (a configuration convention for agentic codebases) as founding contributions. Platinum members at launch include AWS, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, with Cisco and Oracle joining at Gold, and the membership had grown to 97 organizations by February 2026 under board chair David Nalley.

The governance move follows the Cloud Native Computing Foundation pattern: a protocol originally owned by one vendor moves to a neutral foundation once competing vendors are all relying on it, which prevents any single owner from leveraging the specification for advantage. MCP also established a formal SEP (Specification Enhancement Proposal) process for contribution. The structural question for the open-AI stack is whether AAIF governance produces a faster-evolving and more interoperable protocol than the single-vendor steward it replaces, or whether the foundation pattern slows specification iteration as members negotiate consensus.