CISCO BLOG BY Vijoy Pandey - At Cisco, we believe in the power of collaboration and neutral governance to drive innovation. That’s why we’re proud to join the newly-formed Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation as a launch Gold member, supporting its mission to advance open standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
MCP, originally created and open-sourced by Anthropic in late 2024, has already gained significant traction as a standard for AI interoperability with software that consumers use, or are part of the toughest enterprise environments. With its transition to the LF under AAIF, we are excited that MCP will now be governed by a neutral, community-driven foundation. This move is a critical first step in making MCP a truly open standard, built by and for the builders focused on driving real-world use cases. We are expecting a full stack of agentic AI open source projects to be a part of AAIF over time, along with the founding contributions of Block’s goose and Open AI’s AGENTS.md projects.
Agents need to be able to work together to be actually useful. They need to freely find each other, communicate, and collaborative on delivering outcomes: A reality that has yet to be achieved. To harness the true transformative potential of AI, the need for open, interoperable frameworks has never been more critical.
We are focused on fostering a thriving ecosystem for agentic AI where agents can work securely and seamlessly across frameworks and vendors. As active technical steering committee members of both the Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol project and the AGNTCY project, we have participated in ensuring they both joined the Linux Foundation in the past year. With MCP being a core part of the AGNTCY architecture since launch, we believe the AAIF is another key piece of this puzzle.