News

Cloud Giants On Board with New 'Agentic AI Foundation'

• By David Ramel
• 12/10/2025

The Linux Foundation yesterday announced the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a new open source umbrella aimed at standardizing and accelerating the development of agentic AI systems and the tooling around them.

While the three founding contributors are Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, the roster of platinum members listed in the Linux Foundation's Dec. 9 announcement immediately adds a clear cloud angle, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Cloudflare joining at launch.

AAIF is positioned as a neutral home for projects that enable AI agents to connect to tools, data, and applications across environments, including public cloud platforms and hybrid enterprise stacks. In the Linux Foundation's framing, "The AAIF provides a neutral, open foundation to ensure this critical capability evolves transparently, collaboratively, and in ways that advance the adoption of leading open source AI projects."

Agentic AI is increasingly being deployed where data lives and operational workloads run, which for many organizations means cloud infrastructure. The foundation's platinum lineup suggests hyperscalers view open agent tooling and interoperability as strategic infrastructure, comparable to earlier open standards that shaped cloud-native computing.

Block's launch post describes the moment as one in which the industry must decide between open infrastructure and a fragmented ecosystem. It defines the focus area plainly: "Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that can take initiative, make decisions, and act independently to achieve goals with minimal human direction." In practice, these systems need reliable ways to discover and invoke services, handle credentials, and move context between models and cloud-hosted resources. AAIF's initial projects speak directly to those needs.

Three Initial Projects
AAIF launches with three donated projects, each aimed at a different layer of the agentic AI stack:

• Model Context Protocol (MCP) -- An open protocol from Anthropic intended as a standard way to connect models to tools and data sources. MCP is described as "the universal standard protocol for connecting AI models to tools, data and applications." The Linux Foundation release says there are "more than 10,000 published MCP servers" spanning developer tooling and enterprise deployments, and notes uptake by multiple commercial platforms.

• goose -- An open source, local-first agent framework from Block. It combines language models, extensible tools, and MCP-based integrations to execute agentic workflows. Even though goose is local-first, its emphasis on standardized integration is aligned with cloud-hosted agent services as well as on-prem and edge use cases.

• AGENTS.md -- A markdown-based convention from OpenAI that provides project-specific guidance to coding agents. The Linux Foundation calls it "a simple, universal standard that gives AI coding agents a consistent source of project-specific guidance needed to operate reliably across different repositories and toolchains." For cloud development teams standardizing multi-repo environments, this is aimed at making agent behavior predictable in CI/CD and platform engineering flows.

Anthropic Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger linked MCP's rise directly to cloud deployment patterns, saying it is now "used by developers building with the most popular agentic coding tools and enterprises deploying on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure." That line underscores why hyperscalers would want the protocol governed in a neutral forum rather than by any single vendor.

Open Governance as a Guardrail Against Lock-In
AAIF follows the Linux Foundation's open governance model, emphasizing interoperability and vendor neutrality. The Linux Foundation executive director, Jim Zemlin, said, "We are seeing AI enter a new phase, as conversational systems shift to autonomous agents that can work together." He added that bringing MCP, AGENTS.md, and goose under AAIF "ensures they can grow with the transparency and stability that only open governance provides."

For cloud customers, the explicit goal is to avoid tool and protocol lock-in as agentic AI becomes a cross-platform layer. The foundation says it will select future projects based on adoption, quality, and community health, rather than funding or corporate sponsorship.

A supporting statement from AWS highlights that theme from a cloud provider perspective: "Placing MCP in a vendor-neutral foundation ensures developers can invest confidently in this universal standard, knowing it will remain open, interoperable, and community-driven." Google Cloud and Microsoft also issued launch endorsements emphasizing cross-platform interoperability and open collaboration for agent ecosystems.

What to Watch Next
AAIF enters a market where cloud providers are rolling out managed agent platforms and SDKs, but where customers are also demanding standards to keep agents portable across services. With MCP, AGENTS.md, and goose as a starting set, the foundation is aiming to create a shared substrate for agentic AI that can run in public clouds, private clouds, and mixed environments.

The Linux Foundation said additional projects from member organizations are already being proposed for inclusion. If those additions extend beyond developer-centric tooling into runtime orchestration, security, or observability, AAIF could become a central standards venue for how agentic AI is built and operated in cloud-native environments.