Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol hit 97 million monthly SDK downloads in December 2025, exactly one year after its launch, and was donated to the Linux Foundation’s newly formed Agentic AI Foundation on December 9, 2025.
What MCP solves
MCP is an open standard for connecting AI models to external tools, data, and applications. Before it existed, every model-tool combination required a separate custom integration. A team connecting five AI models to ten internal systems needed fifty bespoke connectors, each with different authentication flows and failure modes. MCP reduces that to a single vendor-neutral protocol both sides speak.
The numbers
At the time of the Linux Foundation announcement, the MCP ecosystem comprised 97 million monthly SDK downloads across Python and TypeScript, more than 10,000 active public servers covering developer tools through Fortune 500 deployments, and first-class client support in ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Visual Studio Code. Adoption followed a deliberate sequence: OpenAI in March 2025, Microsoft in July 2025, AWS in November 2025, and Linux Foundation governance in December 2025. Each step removed a specific hesitation from the industry.
The Agentic AI Foundation
The AAIF is a directed fund under the Linux Foundation, co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, with Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg as supporting members. MCP joins two other founding projects: goose, an open-source agent framework from Block, and AGENTS.md, an OpenAI standard that gives coding agents consistent project instructions across repositories.
Linux Foundation stewardship puts MCP in the same class as Kubernetes, Node.js, and PyTorch: critical infrastructure maintained in the open with no single commercial owner.
What it means for enterprise adoption
Enterprise procurement had one remaining concern before the handoff: the risk that Anthropic could alter the specification for commercial advantage. That concern is resolved. Developers building on MCP are no longer betting on Anthropic’s goodwill; they are building on a standard backed by every major cloud provider simultaneously. A survey of MCP adopters found 72% planning to increase their usage.
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.