An initiative to advance open source agentic AI under the Linux Foundation umbrella
Today, the industry is making a pivotal choice. Block, Anthropic, OpenAI, and other leaders in AI are launching the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) to ensure agentic AI develops as an open, collaborative ecosystem. Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that can take initiative, make decisions, and act independently to achieve goals with minimal human direction.
The AAIF is a vendor-neutral home for open source agentic AI projects where no single company dominates, providing funding for critical community programs and research, and building open protocols that let systems from different builders work together seamlessly. Block is contributing its open source agent goose to the AAIF, along with Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md .
In addition to the three founding members, the AAIF’s top tier members include Microsoft, Google, Bloomberg, Amazon Web Services, and Cloudflare. Gold tier members include Arcade.dev, Cisco, Datadog, Docker, JetBrains, Oracle, Runlayer, SAP, Snowflake, Temporal, Tetrate.io , and Twilio Inc. Silver members of the AAIF include Chronosphere, Cosmonic, Elasticsearch, Eve Security, Hugging Face, Kubermatic, KYXStart, LanceDB, NinjaTech AI, Obot.ai , Prefect.io , Pydantic, Spectro Cloud, Inc., Stacklok, SUSE, WorkOS, and ZED.
Why This Matters Now
AI systems represent one of the most significant technological shifts in decades. These systems are fundamentally reshaping how developers build software, how businesses operate, and how people solve complex problems. Use of autonomous agents promises to accelerate this even further.
But we're at a critical juncture. We have an unprecedented opportunity to shape how this technology develops. Will we build open, interoperable infrastructure that serves everyone? Or will we see fragmentation that limits this powerful technology's potential? Without collaborative open development, we risk missing the full potential of agentic AI where everyone benefits thanks to open standards, open protocols, and open systems on which other tools are built. We also risk concentrating the power in the hands of a few, which dampers competition and restricts accessibility. In a proprietary, siloed ecosystem, breakthrough ideas can't easily build on each other, integration challenges slow enterprise adoption and limit use cases, accessibility barriers prevent smaller organizations from benefiting, and research limitations slow academic and independent innovation.
History proves there’s a better path. The Internet, Linux, and the Web succeeded precisely because they were open. They empowered anyone with talent and determination to build, innovate, and create value on top of open infrastructure. Agentic AI deserves the same opportunity. We hope that the AAIF can become what the W3C is for the Web: a set of standards and protocols that guarantee interoperability, open access, and freedom of choice with open source reference implementations.
What AAIF Will Do
The Agentic AI Foundation provides a neutral home where companies, researchers, and independent developers can collaborate on open source agentic AI.
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