Anthropic donated the Model Context Protocol to the Linux Foundation in December 2025, handing governance of the fastest-growing standard in AI to a neutral body co-founded with Block and OpenAI. At the time of the announcement, MCP had surpassed 97 million monthly SDK downloads and 10,000 active public servers.
What MCP Does
MCP is an open standard that creates a universal connection layer between AI models and external tools, data sources, and business systems. Before MCP, every AI application required a bespoke integration for every tool it needed to access. A team connecting an AI assistant to five internal systems and ten business tools faced fifty separate integrations, each with different authentication flows and failure modes. MCP collapses that into a single protocol that any compliant AI client and any compliant tool can speak.
Who Has Adopted It
Within a year of its launch in November 2024, MCP had been adopted by ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Visual Studio Code. Enterprise deployment support is available from AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The Agentic AI Foundation co-founders include Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, with Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg among the supporting members.
Why the Linux Foundation
Handing MCP to an independent body removed the central objection any competitor had to adopting it: the risk that Anthropic could change the rules once the protocol achieved dominance. The Linux Foundation has previously stewarded the Linux kernel, Kubernetes, Node.js, and PyTorch – each of which became critical infrastructure precisely because no single company controlled it. MCP’s technical maintainers retain full autonomy over the protocol’s direction; the Foundation governs strategy, budget, and membership.
Three Founding Projects
MCP joins two other projects as founding members of the Agentic AI Foundation: Goose, an open-source agent framework from Block, and AGENTS.md, a standard from OpenAI that gives AI coding tools consistent project instructions. The Linux Foundation’s executive director Jim Zemlin described the three as “essential tools for developers building this new class of agentic technologies.”
What Comes Next
MCP now has an official community-driven registry for discovering available servers. Anthropic recently launched Tool Search and Programmatic Tool Calling capabilities in its API to handle production-scale deployments managing thousands of tools. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 40% of enterprise applications will feature task-specific AI agents – and MCP is the protocol those agents are most likely to use to connect to the systems around them.
John Moore is the editor of fastai.news, an independent publication covering developments in artificial intelligence.
He founded fastai.news in April 2026 to apply the same rigorous, neutral reporting standards he established at Powerboat News – his international publication – to the fast-moving world of AI.
With no filler and no opinion, fastai.news reports what is happening in AI models, research, business and tools, and leaves readers to draw their own conclusions.
John is based in Buckinghamshire, England.