Major AI rivals just co-founded a foundation for open source agent development — will the rest be on board with a playbook from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block?

Ever since the emergence of generative AI fueled by multi-billion-dollar investments by tech corporations, there has been a rising concern for regulation to help prevent the technology from veering off its guardrails and causing potential harm to humanity.

Until now, the measures in place to ensure the technology remains secure have barely scratched the surface. However, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block recently co-founded a new open source organization called the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), designed to promote a clear path and standards for developing AI-powered agents.

The Agentic AI Foundation was founded under the Linux Foundation, which oversees the development of Linux operating systems and other projects, providing legal and technical support.

What's more, the companies are also donating some of their agentic AI tech to the foundation to support the cause. For instance, Anthropic is transferring ownership of its Model Context Protocol (MCP) over to the foundation, which will help promote a standard way to connect models and agents to tools and data.

OpenAI will donate Agents.md to the foundation. It will help create rules for coding agents when interacting with programs and websites. Finally, Block will avail Goose, its framework for building AI agents. It's worth noting that the platforms are already free to use, but others can now contribute to the development process for better functionality and sophisticated capabilities.

While speaking to TechCrunch, OpenAI engineer Nick Cooper indicated:

“We need multiple [protocols] to negotiate, communicate, and work together to deliver value for people, and that sort of openness and communication is why it’s not ever going to be one provider, one host, one company.”

Cooper says protocols should be a shared language, making it easier for AI agents and systems to work together without the developer's intervention. “That open interoperability—that open standard—really means that companies can talk across providers, and across agentic systems,” added Cooper.

According to OpenAI CTO of B2B apps, Srinivas Narayanan, AI agents are on the verge of communicating with each other during business operations. As such, AI labs following the same standards when developing their models and agents will help foster effective communication. “Open source is going to play a very big role in how AI is shaped and adopted in the real world,” Narayanan added.

While the Agentic AI Foundation shows great promise in the ever-evolving AI industry since it promotes openness, making it easier to integrate AI agents across the economy, it remains to be seen whether this will drive more user engagement with foundational models.

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