AAIF

The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) launched under the Linux Foundation on December 9, 2025, with Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI contributing three existing projects: Model Context Protocol (MCP), goose, and AGENTS.md. Structured as a directed fund, AAIF provides an institutional home for shared agent infrastructure, with neutral, open governance as a stated goal.[3][4]

The founding projects address different parts of agent development. AGENTS.md gives coding agents consistent repository instructions; goose is a local-first agent framework combining language models, extensible tools, and MCP integration; MCP connects AI systems to tools, data, and applications. Later additions extended this portfolio to traffic control and communication between independent agents.[3][8][10]

The projects brought to AAIF had separate histories before the foundation’s formation. Anthropic open-sourced MCP in November 2024, Block released goose in early 2025, and OpenAI released AGENTS.md in August 2025. These earlier releases supplied the tools and communities that became AAIF’s founding portfolio.[3]

Adewale Abati’s January 28, 2025 introduction described codename goose as an on-machine, open source AI agent built to automate tasks. Block subsequently contributed the project to AAIF at the foundation’s December launch.[13][3]

AGENTS.md addressed Codex’s need to find project-specific coding conventions, build steps, and testing requirements predictably. At AAIF’s launch, the foundation reported adoption by more than 60,000 open source projects and agent frameworks, alongside more than 10,000 published MCP servers. These figures describe the contributed projects’ ecosystems.[4][3]

AAIF’s launch roster included eight Platinum organizations—AWS, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI—plus 18 Gold and 23 Silver organizations. Obot.ai also donated its MCP Dev Summit events and podcast.[3]

By February 24, 2026, AAIF’s board had appointed a Technical Committee with one representative from each Platinum organization. The committee was tasked with defining admission requirements and reviewing project proposals; it met biweekly, with recorded meetings open to observers. David Nalley, then AWS director of developer experience, became governing board chair. Shopify’s Zhong Wu had joined in January as the Gold-member representative.[6][5]

Seven working groups covered identity and trust, accuracy and reliability, workflow integration, agentic commerce, security and privacy, observability and traceability, and governance, risk, and regulatory alignment. Nalley’s first-quarter update identified dynamic MCP authorization, trust, conformance testing, and agent-fleet orchestration as ongoing technical challenges. Proposed authorization mitigations included OAuth client ID metadata documents and registry-based trust.[6]

MCP Apps was announced on January 26, 2026, as the first official MCP extension. It lets tools return interactive interfaces inside conversations. A tool’s metadata points to a UI resource containing bundled HTML and JavaScript; the host fetches it, renders it in a sandboxed iframe, and enables bidirectional communication through JSON-RPC over postMessage. A sales dashboard, for example, can let users filter regions and inspect accounts directly, while keeping the model informed of their interactions.[7]

The extension built on MCP-UI and OpenAI’s Apps SDK. MCP-UI creators Ido Salomon and Liad Yosef incubated UI patterns and moderated the community working-group channel; Nick Cooper helped deliver OpenAI’s Apps SDK. Anthropic’s Sean Strong, Olivier Chafik, Anton Pidkuiko, and Jerome Swannack helped steer MCP Apps from proposal to production, with feedback and testing from the UI Community Working Group. Nalley credited AAIF’s neutral governance with enabling the OpenAI–Anthropic collaboration.[7][6]

The project announcement, updated July 9, 2026, listed MCP Apps support in Claude’s web and desktop experiences, goose, VS Code Insiders, and ChatGPT. Its security model includes restricted iframe permissions and loggable UI-to-host messages; hosts can review templates and require approval for UI-initiated tool calls. MCP-UI continued alongside the official extension.[7]

Goose’s foundation transition also involved a repository move. In an April 7, 2026 announcement, Michael Neale reported that the repository and related projects had moved from block/goose to the aaif-goose organization. The goose repository identifies the project as part of AAIF at the Linux Foundation; on September 18, 2026, it displayed 54.4k stars and 6.3k forks.[14][15]

AAIF announced agentgateway as its fourth hosted project on June 4, 2026. Licensed under Apache 2.0, it combines a control plane with a proxy data plane for MCP, Agent2Agent (A2A), model inference, HTTP, and gRPC traffic. Its capabilities include routing, authentication and authorization, observability, rate limits, and budget controls. MCP virtualization federates multiple tool servers behind one access point with tool-level access policies. The foundation reported 300+ active contributors across over 60 organizations at admission.[8]

On August 17, 2026, AAIF announced A2A as joining the foundation as a hosted project. A2A standardizes communication between agents across frameworks and vendors: agents publish structured agent cards describing their capabilities and how to reach them, enabling discovery, task delegation, and result exchange. This adds inter-agent communication alongside MCP’s tool connectivity and agentgateway’s traffic mediation. The foundation reported 150+ A2A partner organizations.[10]

A2A also arrived with an existing development history. Google launched it in April 2025 and donated it to the Linux Foundation; IBM’s Agent Communication Protocol merged into A2A in August 2025. Its first stable specification, v1.0, shipped in March 2026 with multi-protocol bindings, version negotiation, multi-tenancy, and signed agent cards. These milestones preceded its AAIF hosting announcement.[10]

On September 1, 2026, CTO Manik Surtani announced a Sandbox phase below Growth, approved by the governing board and Technical Committee. He explained that the previous admission bar required production scale and maintainer diversity that promising early projects could not yet demonstrate. Sandbox requires a working implementation, an active named maintainer, and early external interest or a credible thesis. It provides standard infrastructure, without funding, marketing, or scanning.[11]

Sandbox includes a six-month checkpoint and a twelve-month window to apply for Growth. Graduation requires production use by two unaffiliated organizations, commits from at least two organizations over six months, and a written growth plan accepted by a Technical Committee sponsor, including the project’s own definition of Impact. Missing the application window opens an archival discussion. Surtani also committed to publishing acceptance, graduation, and archival counts at annual reviews.[11]

AAIF reported 146 member organizations on February 24, 2026, after adding 97 members. In August 2026, it reported 247 organizations worldwide following 57 additions over the preceding quarter: three Gold, 33 Silver, and 21 Associate members. Alibaba, Visa, and Wells Fargo were the new Gold members.[5][9]

AAIF’s membership terms, accessed September 18, 2026, listed paid Platinum and Gold memberships and headcount-based Silver dues. For existing Linux Foundation members, displayed prices were $350,000 for Platinum, $200,000 for Gold, and $5,000–$75,000 for Silver. Approved nonprofit, academic, and government Associate members could participate at no cost, without board representation or voting rights. Platinum membership guaranteed a board seat; Gold members could nominate candidates for an elected shared seat.[12]

In its August 2026 announcement, AAIF described its recently released Agentic AI Momentum Report as tracking 116 open source projects across five layers of the agentic AI stack.[9]