I’ve typed the letters “MCP” into probably every post on this blog without ever really stopping to ask who actually runs it. Turns out the answer changed this year, and it’s a bigger deal than I first assumed. If you want the fuller version of what MCP actually does day to day, I wrote a separate explainer on that here — this post is specifically about who’s steering it now.

Short version: in December 2025 the Linux Foundation set up something called the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) — basically a neutral home for AI-agent infrastructure that isn’t controlled by whichever company happened to invent it. Three things anchored the launch:

  • MCP, handed over by Anthropic
  • goose, Block’s coding agent, handed over by Block
  • AGENTS.md, the convention-file format, handed over by OpenAI

goose’s move was the most concrete — its repo physically relocated from block/goose to aaif-goose/goose on April 7, docs and all.

Honestly my first reaction was “okay, but does this change anything for me.” Not really, day to day — servers you’ve already got running keep running exactly the same. What changes is who gets a vote on where the protocol goes from here. There’s now a Technical Steering Committee with seats from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and community reps, not just one company’s product team deciding unilaterally what the next spec revision looks like or which breaking changes are acceptable.

The number that actually surprised me: the public MCP server registry is past 10,000 entries. I knew it was popular. I didn’t realize it was “basically the new REST” popular — the kind of scale where a single vendor steering the whole thing starts to feel like a real structural risk rather than a minor inconvenience, which is presumably part of why this move happened when it did.

A stat worth sitting with, if you’re the type who cares about who’s backing this stuff: platinum members of the foundation include AWS, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. That’s a lot of usually-competing companies agreeing to share the steering wheel on infrastructure none of them can afford to let a rival unilaterally control.

There’s a roadmap out through 2027 too — an MCP v2 spec (streaming, better auth, pagination), a formal spec for A2A (the same protocol Hermes Agent and Langflow both bolted on this year), and AGENTS.md’s first stable release. I’ll believe the timeline when I see it, roadmaps always slip, but the direction seems set either way, and it’s a genuinely different governance model than most of the access and license stories I end up writing about here.

Source, if you want the primary document instead of my summary: Linux Foundation press release.