Today marks a major milestone for the Model Context Protocol. Anthropic is donating MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation. MCP will become a founding project of the newly created foundation.
In one year, MCP has become one of the fastest-growing and widely-adopted open-source projects in AI: Over 97 million monthly SDK downloads, 10,000 active servers and first-class client support across major AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Visual Studio Code and many more.
Since its inception, we’ve remained committed to ensuring MCP remains open and community-driven. This move formalizes that commitment—ensuring MCP’s vendor-neutrality and long-term independence under the same neutral stewardship that supports Kubernetes, PyTorch, and Node.js. Anthropic’s commitment to MCP is unchanged: we will continue to invest in its development, maintain core infrastructure, and actively participate in the community.
The Agentic AI Foundation
MCP will be a founding project of the newly created 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 to advance open-source innovation in agentic AI.
MCP joins two other founding projects: goose by Block and AGENTS.md by OpenAI as founding projects.
The AAIF Governing Board will make decisions regarding strategic investments, budget allocation, member recruitment, and approval of new projects, while individual projects, such as MCP, maintain full autonomy over their technical direction and day-to-day operations.
MCP’s maintainer structure stays the same
For MCP little changes. The governance model we introduced earlier this year continues as is. The people making decisions about the protocol are still the maintainers who have been stewarding it, guided by community input through our SEP process.
The Linux Foundation provides a neutral home and infrastructure that allows maintainers to operate independently, and will not dictate the technical direction of MCP.
Thank you
To all who’ve adopted and contributed to MCP so far, thank you. None of this would’ve been possible without your contribution. From building servers to maintaining SDKs to filing issues to improving documentation to welcoming new visitors and everything in between, you’ve made MCP what it is today.
Here’s to MCP’s next chapter under the Linux Foundation’s stewardship.