Anthropic Donates MCP to Linux Foundation, USB-C for AI with OpenAI, Microsoft Backing

MCP Becomes Vendor-Neutral Open Standard

Anthropic has donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund under the Linux Foundation. The foundation is co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, with support from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg.

The MCP donation was finalized on December 9, 2025, establishing MCP as a vendor-neutral open standard.

What is MCP?

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard framework introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 to standardize how AI systems integrate and share data with external tools, systems, and data sources.

Often called the USB-C for AI, MCP is a unified protocol that enables AI models to communicate with external tools like databases, search engines, and APIs.

Explosive Adoption

MCP has rapidly become the universal standard protocol for connecting AI models to tools and data:

Over 10,000 published MCP servers covering everything from developer tools to Fortune 500 deployments

97 million monthly SDK downloads across Python and TypeScript

Adoption by Major Players

MCP has been adopted by OpenAI and Microsoft, marking a notable case of industry collaboration where competitors embrace a standard developed by Anthropic.

2026 Roadmap

The Agentic AI Foundation announced the following plans:

MCP Dev Summit: April 2-3, 2026, in New York City

TypeScript SDK v2 stable release: Expected in Q1 2026, with native support for asynchronous features