Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Block (parent company of Square), Microsoft, Cloudflare, Amazon, and Bloomberg are founding governance board members of the newly-formed Agentic AI Foundation, a new part of the Linux Foundation. From the announcement…

The advent of agentic AI represents a new era of autonomous decision making and coordination across AI systems that will transform and revolutionize entire industries. The AAIF provides a neutral, open foundation to ensure this critical capability evolves transparently, collaboratively, and in ways that advance the adoption of leading open source AI projects. Its inaugural projects, AGENTS.md, goose and MCP, lay the groundwork for a shared ecosystem of tools, standards, and community-driven innovation.

I’m really glad to see something like this finally form. Each of the foundation model companies have been releasing competing “standards,” which really weren’t that at all since they were authored and governed by themselves, rather than a non-profit governance board. For those of us who use multiple agents in our coding practice, leveraging each one’s unique skills, it has been a pain in the ass to set up a repo to work with all them.

Like Simon though, I hope they help standardize inference APIs. There are several projects designed specifically just to address the complexity of following all the different model providers’ APIs. We desperately need some standardization. I would hope the governance board would include experimental vendor extensions to such a standard though — similar to how W3C provided vendor extensions to CSS so that model providers could still innovate and propose functionality without having to wait for it to go through the standardization process.