MCP Just Changed Hands. Watch What Happens Next.

Anthropic handed MCP to the Linux Foundation this week, under a new umbrella called the Agentic AI Foundation. Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI co-founded it — Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg joined as supporters, and ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, VS Code, and Cursor already support the protocol.

This is the move you make when something graduates from “our project” to “the industry’s project.” On paper, that’s exactly what should happen with a protocol this widely adopted.

Here’s what changes though: standards bodies serve their members, and enterprise vendors have very different needs than the people actually running MCP servers day to day. The governance model that works for a Fortune 500 deploying a handful of approved integrations is not the same one that serves a practitioner who ships new tools every week and needs the spec to move when the use cases do.

Vendor-neutral governance is how protocols survive long-term — and frankly, Anthropic holding the keys alone wasn’t a great arrangement either.

But if you’ve been building on MCP, the ground just shifted. The people who will shape the next version of this spec are now sitting at a committee table. That’s a different conversation than the one that produced the protocol in the first place.

Get involved early, or accept the spec you’re handed.