Microsoft Partners on Agentic AI Foundation for Interoperability

Microsoft is partnering with Amazon AWS, Anthropic, Block, Cloudflare, Bloomberg, Google, and OpenAI on the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a new neutral and open organization for standardizing agentic AI technologies. The AAIF is part of The Linux Foundation, which also oversees the Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers program.

“We are seeing AI enter a new phase, as conversational systems shift to autonomous agents that can work together,” Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin says. “Within just one year, MCP [Model Context Protocol], AGENTS.md and goose have become essential tools for developers building this new class of agentic technologies. Bringing these projects together under the AAIF ensures they can grow with the transparency and stability that only open governance provides. The Linux Foundation is proud to serve as the neutral home where they will continue to build AI infrastructure the world will rely on.”

As you may recall, Anthropic created and then opened up its MCP protocol as a standardized way for AI systems to interact with services, data sources, and tools. And it was quickly adopted by all the most important players in AI, including Microsoft and OpenAI. Today, MCP became one of three initial projects contributed to the AAIF, alongside Block’s goose, a local, on-device AI agent, and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md, a way to provide AI agents with the context they need to complete tasks autonomously.

In addition to the cofounders noted above, the AAIF is launching with several platinum members that include Adyen, Arcade.dev, Cisco, Datadog, Docker, Ericsson, IBM, JetBrains, Okta, Oracle, Runlayer, Salesforce, SAP, Shopify, Snowflake, Temporal, Tetrate, and Twilio and silver members like Apify, Chronosphere, Cosmonic, Elasticsearch, Eve Security, Hugging Face, Kubermatic, KYXStart, LanceDB, Mirantis, NinjaTech AI, Obot.ai, Prefect.io, Pydantic, Shinkai.com, Solo.io, Spectro Cloud, Stacklok, SUSE, Uber, WorkOS, Zapier and ZED. And there’s an MCP Summit scheduled for April 2-3, 2026 in New York City.

“For the agentic future to become a reality, we have to build it together, and we have to build it in the open,” Microsoft vice president Chris DiBona added. “The AAIF will give industry and developers a shared and transparent path to evolve the agentic AI ecosystem. Microsoft remains committed to supporting this journey to create an open, interoperable and reliable foundation for everyone building and using agents.”