Open agent protocols need institutions
Anthropic's December 9 donation moves the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to a new institution for artificial intelligence (AI): the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund under the Linux Foundation. Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI co-found the effort, with support from several other major technology companies.
The transfer recognizes a lesson that recurs throughout technical history: an open protocol needs more than accessible code. It needs an institution people expect to outlast any one vendor's strategy.