Anthropic Donates Model Context Protocol to New Agentic AI Foundation
Anthropic transfers the Model Context Protocol to the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation to guarantee vendor-neutral governance. The protocol boasts massive adoption with 97 million monthly SDK downloads.
Anthropic transfers the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the newly established Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund operating under the Linux Foundation. This strategic donation ensures MCP remains vendor-neutral and independent, mirroring the governance model that supports major open-source technologies like Kubernetes and PyTorch. The protocol experiences explosive growth in its first year, reaching 97 million monthly SDK downloads and gaining support across major AI platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor.
The Agentic AI Foundation emerges as a collaborative effort co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, with additional backing from tech giants like Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Cloudflare. MCP joins Block's goose and OpenAI's AGENTS.md as founding projects within this new organization. A governing board oversees strategic investments and budget allocation for the foundation, while individual projects like MCP retain complete autonomy over their technical direction and daily operations.
Despite the organizational shift, the day-to-day experience for MCP remains largely unchanged. The existing maintainer structure and governance model continue as they are, meaning the same core maintainers guide the protocol's development using the established SEP process. The Linux Foundation simply provides a neutral home and infrastructure, allowing the maintainers to operate independently without external interference in MCP's technical roadmap.