OpenAI recently announced it is co-founding the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, joining forces with Anthropic and Block to establish neutral governance for open, interoperable infrastructure as agentic AI systems move from experimentation into real-world deployment.

The initiative is backed by major technology and data companies, including Google, Microsoft, AWS, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare. The foundation aims to prevent fragmentation in the rapidly evolving agentic AI ecosystem by creating shared standards that allow AI agents to operate safely, portably, and reliably across platforms.

As part of the launch, OpenAI is contributing AGENTS.md, an open-format specification that provides AI agents with project-specific instructions and operational context. OpenAI said the contribution is intended to ensure long-term support and community-led evolution of the format as adoption accelerates.

AAIF is designed to serve as a shared home for developing and governing these standards. It operates as a directed fund under the Linux Foundation, drawing on the organization’s experience stewarding widely adopted open-source projects such as the Linux kernel, Kubernetes, and PyTorch.

AGENTS.md originated as a practical solution within OpenAI’s Codex tooling, offering a lightweight Markdown file that sits alongside a project’s README to guide AI agents on coding conventions, build steps, and testing requirements. Since its release in August 2025, the format has been adopted by more than 60,000 open-source projects and tools, including Github Copilot, VS Code, Cursor, and Gemini CLI.

In addition to AGENTS.md, the foundation’s co-founders are contributing key projects to AAIF, including Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Block’s goose. Together, these contributions are intended to form the backbone of an open, vendor-neutral agentic AI ecosystem.

Established by OpenAI, Anthropic, Block, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare, the Agentic AI Foundation is positioned to guide the next phase of agentic AI development through shared investment, open collaboration, and community-led governance.