Response to China's expansion: US tech giants have formed an alliance to standardize AI agents - ForkLog: cryptocurrencies, AI, singularity, future

# Response to China’s expansion: US tech giants formed an alliance to standardize AI agents

The Linux Foundation has established a new organization — Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). Its goal is to prevent fragmentation of the AI agent segment into numerous incompatible, closed products.

The foundation will serve as a neutral environment for the development of open projects in the digital assistant space. Key contributions to launching the initiative include:

• Anthropic — provided the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard for connecting models to external data and tools;
• Block — launched the Goose platform for digital assistants;
• OpenAI — proposed the AGENTS.md solution, a set of instructions for simplified configuration of development tools in repositories.

The MCP ecosystem already covers over 10,000 active public registries.

Source: Anthropic. Tools are positioned as the foundational infrastructure in the era of AI agents.

Among other members of AAIF: AWS, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Cisco, Datadog, Docker, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Snowflake, Twilio, Hugging Face, Uber, SUSE, and others.

OpenAI developer Nick Cooper noted that protocols are a “common language.” They enable different agents and systems to work together without the need to rebuild integrations.

“We need several protocols for negotiation, communication, and collaboration. This will benefit people, and such openness and interaction are the reasons why there will never be a single host or company,” he said.

Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin stated that the goal of the initiative is to avoid “closed walls” of proprietary stacks that block the connection of tools, management, and behavior of AI agents.

“By unifying these projects within AAIF, we can coordinate interactions, security models, and best practices specifically for AI assistants,” he noted.

Fight against China

A December 2025 MIT study showed that China leads in the number of global open-source AI downloads, accounting for 17.1%. The US share is 15.8%.

Source: MIT.DeepSeek, Alibaba and others have filled the market with high-performance models, while their American competitors focus on closed APIs in pursuit of profit.

Chinese open-source neural networks create technological dependency: developers worldwide build their work on this infrastructure, reducing the influence of American providers.

Funding

The new organization is funded through a dedicated fund. Companies can contribute money via membership fees.

Zemlin emphasized that project roadmaps are set by technical steering committees. No group member has unilateral voting rights in choosing the direction of activities.

“An early indicator of success will be the development and adoption of common standards used by agents around the world,” added Linux Foundation CEO.

Cooper from OpenAI considers the success to be “the evolution of standards” — their systematic development and the regular appearance of new proposals.

Unification of rules saves developers time when creating custom connectors. It also results in more predictable agent behavior in codebases and simplified deployment in security-oriented ecosystems.

Recall that in November, Microsoft experts introduced an environment for testing AI agents and identified vulnerabilities inherent in modern digital assistants.