OpenAI Co-founds Agentic AI Foundation and Donates AGENTS.md

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block have co-founded the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation to establish open, interoperable standards for agentic AI systems. This initiative aims to prevent ecosystem fragmentation as agentic AI moves from experimental prototypes into real-world production environments.

The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)

The Agentic AI Foundation is a neutral stewardship body designed to provide open, interoperable infrastructure for agentic AI. Operating as a directed fund under the Linux Foundation, the AAIF leverages the Linux Foundation's experience in governing critical open-source projects like Kubernetes and PyTorch to ensure that no single company controls the direction of foundational agentic infrastructure.

The foundation was established with the support of several major industry players, including:

  • Co-founders: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block.
  • Supporting members: Google, Microsoft, AWS, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare.

AGENTS.md: A Standard for Agent Context

OpenAI has contributed the AGENTS.md format to the AAIF to ensure its long-term, vendor-neutral support and adoption. AGENTS.md is a lightweight Markdown file that lives alongside a project's README.md, providing AI coding agents with a consistent, project-specific source of instructions and context.

Technical Purpose and Adoption

AGENTS.md was originally developed to provide agents like Codex with a predictable way to find coding conventions, build steps, and testing requirements. By standardizing how agents receive project-specific guidance, the format makes agent behavior more predictable across diverse repositories and build systems.

Since its release in August 2025, AGENTS.md has been adopted by over 60,000 open-source projects and various agent frameworks, including:

  • Amp
  • Codex
  • Cursor
  • Devin
  • Factory
  • Gemini CLI
  • GitHub Copilot
  • GitHub Copilot
  • Jules
  • VS Code

Benefits of Open Contribution

By donating AGENTS.md to the AAIF, OpenAI ensures that developers and enterprises have a portable way to provide agent context, the format can evolve through community input, and the direction of the standard is not controlled by a single entity.

Interoperability and the Open Ecosystem

Open standards are critical for making agentic systems safer, easier to build, and and more portable across different tools and platforms. Without common conventions and neutral governance, the industry risks creating incompatible silos that limit safety and progress.

OpenAI's involvement in the AAIF is part of a broader effort toward interoperability, building on previous contributions to the Model Context Protocol (MCP). OpenAI has incorporated MCP as the foundation for connectors and apps in ChatGPT, and recently collaborated with Anthropic and MCP-UI to extend the Apps SDK to all MCP developers via MCP Apps.

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