In December 2025, Anthropic donated the Model Context Protocol to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund under the Linux Foundation. Co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, the AAIF ensures the MCP remains an open standard for AI agent communication and collaboration.
- Directed Fund Model: AAIF operates as a directed fund
- Neutral Governance: Industry-neutral oversight
- Open Standards: Commitment to open development
- Community-Driven: Collaborative decision-making
- Anthropic: Creator of Claude and original MCP developer
- Block (Square): Payment and financial services
- OpenAI: ChatGPT and GPT platform
- Technical Steering Committee
- Working Groups for specific initiatives
- Spec Enhancement Proposal (SEP) process
- Community contribution guidelines
- Maintain MCP as free and open protocol
- Enable interoperability across AI platforms
- Prevent vendor lock-in
- Foster innovation through openness
- Bring together competing companies
- Share best practices and learnings
- Coordinate specification evolution
- Build common ecosystem
- Address enterprise readiness concerns
- Develop security and compliance standards
- Create deployment guidelines
- Provide certification programs
The AAIF is focusing on key areas for MCP evolution:
- Stateless HTTP improvements
- Session migration capabilities
- Horizontal scaling support
- Load balancer compatibility
- MCP Server Cards for metadata
- Transform from host-to-tool to distributed agent system
- Enable negotiation and delegation
- Implement governance frameworks
- Support multi-agent workflows
- Audit trail requirements
- SSO-integrated authentication
- Gateway behavior standards
- Configuration portability
- Formal specification process
- Working group structures
- Community contribution models
- Release management
- Transport Layer: Protocol improvements
- Security: Authentication and authorization
- Enterprise: Production deployment
- Agent Communication: Multi-agent protocols
- Spec Enhancement Proposals (SEPs)
- GitHub issues and discussions
- Implementation feedback
- Testing and validation
- Official documentation
- Reference implementations
- Sample servers and clients
- Integration guides
Gartner forecasts:
- 75% of API gateway vendors will have MCP features by 2026
- 50% of iPaaS vendors will support MCP
- Hundreds of MCP servers developed
- Major platforms adding support
- Enterprise deployments increasing
- Developer community expanding
- JSON-RPC based messaging
- Transport layer (stdio, HTTP/SSE)
- Tool and resource definitions
- Prompt templates
- Sampling requests
- Authentication mechanisms
- Authorization models
- Data encryption
- Audit requirements
- Version negotiation
- Backwards compatibility
- Feature detection
- Graceful degradation
- Stable, predictable protocol
- Rich ecosystem of tools
- Community support
- Career opportunities
- Vendor neutrality
- Long-term stability
- Industry best practices
- Compliance frameworks
- Interoperability
- Market expansion
- Reduced integration costs
- Innovation enablement
The Linux Foundation AAIF does not provide software but governs the MCP specification. All MCP implementations and servers operate under this governance framework.
The MCP protocol specification is free and open. Linux Foundation membership is separate and optional.