Model Context Protocol Donated to Linux Foundation: The TCP/IP of Agentic AI

In December 2025, Anthropic donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. This wasn’t an act of charity—it was strategic positioning that may have just determined the infrastructure layer of the entire agentic economy.

MCP By The Numbers

• 97 million monthly SDK downloads
• 10,000+ active servers
• ~2,000 entries in the MCP Registry (407% growth since September)
• First-class client support across ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Cursor, and VS Code

Why This Matters

MCP provides a standard way for AI agents to connect to data sources and tools. By donating it to a neutral foundation, Anthropic ensured MCP would become critical infrastructure rather than a competitive weapon that might be forked or abandoned.

As Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, put it: “A year later, it’s become the industry standard for connecting AI systems to data and tools.”

The Agentic AI Foundation

MCP now sits alongside three other founding projects under the AAIF:

• AGENTS.md (OpenAI): Adopted by 60,000+ open-source projects for AI coding agent instructions
• goose (Block): An open-source, local-first agent framework
• Agent2Agent / A2A (Google): Enables communication between autonomous agents, supported by 150+ organizations

The Strategic Implication

The foundation layer war is over. MCP has won. These protocols are becoming the TCP/IP of the agentic economy—essential infrastructure that no single company controls but upon which all higher-value services depend.

The fight now moves to the commerce, monetization, and attribution layers built on top.

Read the full analysis: The AI Advertising Wars