An attempt to provide vendor-neutral oversight as the agent train barrels on

The Linux Foundation on Tuesday said it has formed the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) to provide vendor-neutral oversight for the development of AI agent infrastructure.

AI agents are machine learning models empowered to access and manipulate other software, such as web browsers. Despite industry acknowledgment that agents pose security problems and IT consultancy Gartner's insistence that many agent-based enterprise projects will be canceled for lack of business value, The Linux Foundation sees value in serving as the Switzerland of free-spending AI firms.

Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI have contributed three projects respectively to this endeavor: Model Context Protocol (MCP), for integrating LLMs with tools; goose, an open source AI agent framework; and AGENTS.md, the equivalent of a README.md file for machines.

"Bringing these projects together under the AAIF ensures they can grow with the transparency and stability that only open governance provides," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of ...