Date: December 9, 2025
Anthropic announced it is donating the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund hosted by the Linux Foundation. The AAIF was co‑founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI and counts support from Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare and Bloomberg.
What MCP is and how widely it is used
MCP was introduced a year ago as an open, universal standard for connecting AI applications to external systems. Since its launch the protocol has seen broad adoption:
- There are more than 10,000 active public MCP servers, ranging from developer tools to Fortune 500 deployments;
- MCP has been integrated into popular AI platforms including ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Visual Studio Code;
- Enterprise infrastructure providers such as AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure now offer deployment support for MCP.
Anthropic says it will continue investing in MCP: Claude includes a directory with over 75 connectors powered by MCP, and Anthropic recently launched Tool Search and Programmatic Tool Calling capabilities in its API to improve production‑scale MCP deployments, enabling efficient handling of thousands of tools and reducing latency in complex agent workflows.
Technical and community developments
- MCP now has an official, community‑driven Registry for discovering available MCP servers;
- The November 25, 2025 spec release introduced features including asynchronous operations, statelessness, server identity and official extensions;
- Official SDKs exist for major programming languages, and the Python and TypeScript SDKs combined have more than 97 million monthly downloads.
Why MCP is being donated to the Linux Foundation
Anthropic has stated a long‑term commitment to keeping MCP open‑source, community‑driven and vendor‑neutral. Donating the protocol to the Linux Foundation is intended to strengthen those guarantees. The Linux Foundation has extensive experience stewarding critical open‑source projects such as the Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, Node.js and PyTorch and is known for facilitating neutral, collaborative governance.
The Agentic AI Foundation aims to guide the development of agentic AI transparently and in the public interest through strategic investment, community building and shared development of open standards. MCP will join other AAIF founding projects including Block’s goose and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md, with the intention of fostering innovation across the agentic AI ecosystem while preserving neutrality and openness.
Governance and next steps
Anthropic says the MCP governance model will remain unchanged: project maintainers will continue to prioritize community input and transparent decision‑making. Anthropic also intends to continue contributing to MCP and other agentic AI projects within the AAIF framework.
Further information
Anthropic points to modelcontextprotocol.io for more information about MCP and to AAIF channels for ways to get involved.
The announcement was published on December 9, 2025.
