Donating The Model Context Protocol And Establishing Of The Agentic Ai Foundation

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) gives AI applications a common way to connect to external data and tools. Anthropic's 2024 introduction described servers exposing data and clients, meaning AI applications, connecting to them, which reduces the need for separate custom integrations. Original announcement.

In December 2025, Anthropic announced MCP's donation to the Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI. The stated aim was to keep MCP a neutral, open, community-driven standard, and Anthropic noted that products from several companies, including ChatGPT, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, had already adopted it. Anthropic said the protocol's governance model would remain unchanged, with maintainers continuing to prioritize community input and transparent decision-making, so the donation changed MCP's institutional home while leaving its decision-making structure in place.