The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) has expanded to 146 members with the addition of 18 new Gold Members and 79 new Silver Members. David Nalley, director of developer experience at AWS, has been appointed as governing board chair to guide the foundation’s strategic priorities around open protocols and interoperable agentic AI standards.
The AAIF serves as a launchpad for the Model Context Protocol to be iterated upon, among other technologies. The foundation now represents a collaboration to advance open protocols, tooling and best practices for agent-based AI systems. The rapid expansion is clear answer to rising industry demand for shared, open standards. AI may yet move from experimental to operational deployments this year. Nevertheless, success will vary for many, especially without clear standards.
Among the 18 new Gold Members are large companies including Akamai, American Express, Autodesk, Circle, Diagrid, Equinix, Global Payments, Hitachi, Huawei, Infobip, JPMorgan Chase, Keycard, Lenovo, Red Hat, ServiceNow, TELUS, UiPath and Workato. The 79 new Silver Members include companies such as 1Password, Mistral AI, Neo4j, and MindsDB.
Governance and strategic direction
David Nalley brings over two decades of open source leadership experience to his role as governing board chair. He will help set the Foundation’s strategic priorities, ensure strong neutral governance, and align member participation. Such participation will revolve around advancing open protocols, interoperability, and production-ready agentic AI standards.
“Agents are rapidly maturing from experimental prototypes to production-ready systems that are fundamentally transforming how we build applications and conduct business across industries,” said Nalley. “Building and scaling open source tools and standards for agentic AI will require the collective expertise and collaboration of all our members.”
Industry demand for standards
The rapid expansion of the AAIF surprised many, although it answered a clear need for some kind of standard. With the organic growth of MCP adoption prior to Anthropic donating it to the newly formed AAIF, it was immediately obvious what benefits this standardization can bring. MCP itself is far from secure. This means one clear course of action for the AAIF group is to make it a safer protocol to use. Typically, novel standards like these arrive on the scene with little in the way of security. This isn’t surprising. Developers will often experience friction whenever a new methodology requires them to respect more safeguards.
By joining the AAIF, new members gain access to an ecosystem where they can directly shape emerging standards. Additionally, they can collaborate on open source innovation, and help meet growing demand for an interoperable agentic infrastructure.
The AAIF was launched in December by the Linux Foundation with three founding projects. These were Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block’s goose framework, and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md. These projects form the basis for advancing open protocols that enable agents to operate interoperably across platforms.