Many of the world's largest AI tech companies are going to start working together on some of their shared problems. Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and a number of other related companies are going to team up as part of the Agentic Artificial Intelligence Foundation, as reported by The Information. Managed by The Linux Foundation, the group will work on developing key open source tools and standards for AI agents, and will share their findings with each other on solving key technical problems.
However, as signs mount that agentic AI is not particularly effective at replacing workers, and rumors of the AI bubble stretching to its limits continue to swirl, agents need to impress, especially if they're being hailed as the next big thing in the AI landscape.
(Image credit: Google)
AI agents have long been seen as a next-generation development for the latest large language models that would finally realize their potential. They could laser-target larger tasks by breaking them down into smaller pieces, which a larger AI model could use to create or complete a larger project or goal.
That's how it works in theory, but as the Harvard Business Review highlights, they rarely achieve the end goal in practice. Especially when it comes to customer-facing roles, AI agents just aren't ready to replace real-world workers as they can't be trusted to complete their tasks effectively enough, or at all. Hallucinations are still a real problem, and the public has little tolerance for abject failure in basic tasks or wild shifts in tone.
That doesn't mean there's no potential there, though. It's the basket the main AI companies are putting their eggs in at the moment, anyhow, hence this new initiative to pool their efforts to create something more effective, and maintain standards that they have a greater say in developing.
The group's first goal will be to develop three existing open-source tools, according to people familiar with the matter. These include: a model context protocol developed by Anthropic called MCP, to standardize how AI agents connect to other applications; an OpenAI format for giving instructions to coding agents, known as Agents.md, and an open source AI agent invented by Block that can run locally on a single computer without networking, called Goose.
MCP is already in use at OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Cursor, so it's no surprise that it was chosen as one of the group's main goals. As it stands, it can connect ChatGPT to a company's Slack, for example, which would allow a manager to quickly summarize conversations. But IT managers speaking to The Information claim there are serious security concerns, especially when it comes to prompt injection attacks, so MCP needs continued development, and the developers need to agree on the best way to patch discovered security holes quickly and effectively.
Cementing the industry
This foundation also has the potential to cement its participants as the premier AI companies. Although it's not just the big tech firms that have joined this foundation, and it is being organized by a long-standing organization with a strong reputation for keeping software development as its main focus, the potential is there for exploitation and, arguably, stagnation.
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