Anthropic Transfers Model Context Protocol to Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation for Open Standards

December 9, 2025

Details

  • On December 9, 2025, Anthropic transferred stewardship of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation.
  • The transfer includes the full MCP specification, reference code, documentation, and trademark rights, all retained under a permissive open-source license.
  • MCP standardizes the sharing of long-term memory, tool metadata, and user preferences between language models and autonomous agents.
  • According to Anthropic, MCP became foundational in its first year, gaining adoption by cloud APIs, open-source agent frameworks, and academic benchmarks.
  • The Agentic AI Foundation will set up a community-elected technical steering committee, with Anthropic holding one non-veto seat—emulating governance models like Kubernetes and PyTorch.
  • The Linux Foundation will provide legal, trademark, and security support to ensure protocol neutrality and community governance.

Impact

This transfer challenges proprietary approaches such as OpenAI’s function-calling and Google’s Bard extensions, heightening standards competition across AI tools. By moving to vendor-neutral governance, the MCP reduces intellectual property risks and appeals to enterprises and governments seeking open interoperability. This shift supports broader policy objectives around transparent AI, and could position MCP as the industry’s default standard, influencing both cloud infrastructure and hardware vendors in the coming year.

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