The Agentic AI Foundation used its North American conference in San Jose on Oct. 22 to announce four new open-source projects, contributed by Anthropic, OpenAI, Hugging Face and Alibaba. The additions bring the group to 10 hosted projects, up from three when it launched in December 2025.
The foundation, known as AAIF, also said its membership had reached 305 organizations, less than a year after launch. Both announcements came at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America, held Oct. 22 and 23 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.
AAIF describes itself as a neutral home for open standards in agentic AI. Its founding projects include MCP, the Model Context Protocol that lets agents connect to tools and data, along with the goose agent framework and AGENTS.md, a file format that tells coding agents how to work in a repository.
The four new projects
Anthropic contributed Agent Skills, an open format for packaging instructions, scripts and resources that an agent can load when it needs specialized knowledge. “Without the right context, even the most intelligent agents fall short,” said David Soria Parra, co-creator and lead maintainer of MCP at Anthropic. He said Anthropic launched Skills a year ago and donated MCP to AAIF less than a year ago.
OpenAI contributed Open Responses, a specification based on its Responses API. It defines a shared schema and streaming events so developers can describe a request once and run it across different model providers with little translation, according to AAIF.
Hugging Face contributed OpenEnv, a framework and community hub for building reinforcement learning environments, the simulated settings where agents are trained by trial and error. It wraps each environment as a container that speaks both MCP and Gym, the interface training libraries use. Ben Burtenshaw, a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, said the project’s committee includes people from Microsoft, Meta-PyTorch, Modal and Prime Intellect, among others.
Alibaba contributed OpenSandbox, a platform for running agents in isolated environments on Docker or Kubernetes, with use cases that include coding agents, agent evaluation and reinforcement learning training. “We don’t want its future to be defined by a single company,” said Xiaobin Xu, Alibaba’s head of development infrastructure.
The new projects join A2A, the Agent2Agent protocol, along with Agent Router, agentgateway, AGENTS.md, goose and MCP.
“Four different companies chose to contribute them to neutral governance,” said Manik Surtani, AAIF’s chief technology officer and co-founder. “That’s the job of this foundation.”
Who’s joining
AAIF said 60 organizations joined in the past quarter, including seven new Gold members, 33 Silver members and 18 Associate members. The Gold members are Ant Group, the Gates Foundation, MongoDB, Nutanix, Royal Bank of Canada, Vercel and Vultr.
Mazin Gilbert, AAIF’s executive director, said the mix of members shows a change in how agents are used. “When financial institutions and philanthropies are working alongside security startups and data companies, agents are no longer a developer experiment,” he said. “They’re becoming institutional infrastructure.”
He said members are asking how agents authenticate, how their actions are verified and who’s accountable when one acts on someone’s behalf. AAIF’s position is that open standards are the way to settle those questions.
The foundation operates under the Linux Foundation, which runs the conference series.
Source: Agentic AI Foundation, AAIF, “Agentic AI Foundation Announces Four New Projects: Agent Skills, Open Responses, OpenEnv, and OpenSandbox”
Additional sources: Agentic AI Foundation, “Agentic AI Foundation Surpasses 300 Members in Less Than One Year”; Linux Foundation Events, Linux Foundation, “AGNTCon + MCPCon North America”
