Anthropic donates MCP to the Linux Foundation's new Agentic AI Foundation

On December 9, 2025, Anthropic donated the Model Context Protocol to the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund under the Linux Foundation co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI with support from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg. MCP became a founding project alongside Block's goose and OpenAI's AGENTS.md.

The three primary announcements published the same day, from Anthropic, the Linux Foundation, and the MCP maintainers, frame the move identically: formalizing vendor neutrality under the same stewardship model that hosts Kubernetes, PyTorch, and Node.js. The maintainers' post states that governance is unchanged, with technical direction continuing through the community SEP process; the Linux Foundation provides the neutral home and does not dictate technical direction.

The Linux Foundation's release put the ecosystem's scale at more than 10,000 published MCP servers one year after launch, with the protocol adopted across Claude, Cursor, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, VS Code, and ChatGPT. The donation was the protocol's last major governance event before the 2026-07-28 stateless revision.