Anthropic donates MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation

Background

MCP is a protocol project whose adoption had grown well beyond a single client or vendor. The project said that at the time of the donation it had more than 97 million monthly SDK downloads, 10,000 active servers, and first-class client support in ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Visual Studio Code.^[1] Those figures point to two kinds of reach: developers downloading the SDK, and client applications that had integrated MCP support.

The donation

On 9 December 2025, Anthropic donated MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation. MCP became a founding project of the newly created foundation. The foundation was co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, with support from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg. MCP joined Block's goose and OpenAI's AGENTS.md as founding projects.^[1]

How governance is split

The foundation's governing board decides strategic investments, budget allocation, member recruitment, and approval of new projects. Individual projects such as MCP keep full autonomy over technical direction and day-to-day operations, and the maintainer structure stays the same.^[1] The arrangement therefore separates shared foundation-level questions from project-level engineering. The board's remit covers money, membership, and which projects join the foundation; MCP's maintainers continue to control technical direction and daily operations. For a project with many clients and a large developer base, that separation matters because changes to the protocol and changes to the foundation are handled in different places. It is a governance change, not a change to the project's maintainer structure.^[1]

Why the founding group matters

MCP was not the only founding project. It joined goose by Block and AGENTS.md by OpenAI, placing the three projects under the same new foundation.^[1] The foundation's co-founders and supporters span companies that also build AI models, cloud infrastructure, and developer tools: Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI co-founded it, while Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg supported it.^[1] That combination gives the foundation a broad base of organizational backing while leaving each project's technical leadership in place.

What changed and what did not

For MCP, the donation changed the project's institutional home: it became a founding project of the Agentic AI Foundation, donated by Anthropic. It did not change the maintainer structure, and individual projects such as MCP keep full autonomy over technical direction and day-to-day operations.^[1] The foundation board's authority covers strategic investments, budget allocation, member recruitment, and approval of new projects.^[1] The project's reported scale—97 million monthly SDK downloads, 10,000 active servers, and support in ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Visual Studio Code—shows that the new foundation is taking on a project with substantial existing usage.^[1]