MCP is donated to the Agentic AI Foundation
Anthropic gives the Model Context Protocol to a new Linux Foundation body co-founded with OpenAI and Block; the plumbing of the agent era becomes neutral infrastructure.
what had to happen · 56 events back to 1943
Every event this one built on, transitively, in order. Direct influences are marked.
00 · One neuron · 1
I · Foundations · 9
- 1948A mathematical theory of communication
- 1949Cells that fire together wire together
- 1950Programming a computer for playing chess
- 1958The perceptron learns
- 1959Samuel's checkers program coins 'machine learning'
- 1960ADALINE and the least-mean-squares rule
- 1965Moore's law
- 1969Perceptrons
- 1970Reverse-mode automatic differentiation
W1 · The first winter · 2
II · Connection · 3
W2 · The second winter · 6
III · Statistics and data · 10
IV · Deep learning · 11
V · Transformers · 9
- 2017Attention is all you need
- 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences
- 2018GPT: generative pre-training
- 2019GPT-2 and the model too dangerous to release
- 2020Scaling laws for neural language models
- 2020GPT-3
- 2020Learning to summarise from human feedback
- 2021Anthropic is founded
- 2021GitHub Copilot writes code
VI · Everyone · 5
- 2022InstructGPT
- 2023Claude
- 2024Claude 3 catches GPT-4
- 2024Claude learns to use a computer
- 2024The Model Context Protocoldirect
A year after its release the Model Context Protocol had more than ten thousand public servers and was built into ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Cursor and Visual Studio Code, which put a standard owned by one laboratory underneath every rival's agents. On 9 December 2025 Anthropic transferred it to the Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation co-founded with OpenAI and Block and backed by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Cloudflare and Bloomberg. The foundation's other founding projects were Block's agent framework goose and the AGENTS.md convention for telling coding agents how a repository works.
The move followed the pattern of earlier infrastructure: Kubernetes had gone from Google to a foundation in 2015 for the same reason, that a standard everyone depends on cannot belong to one competitor. It also acknowledged what the agents of 2025 had become. A model that reads your files, runs your tools and acts on your behalf needs a shared, inspectable contract for doing so, and the contract was now in neutral hands.
The event is on this timeline as a small one with a long consequence, the moment the agent ecosystem acquired governance, and as the reason this site can serve its dataset to any agent through the same protocol.
what it led to · 0 events downstream
A leaf, for now. Nothing in the archive has built on it yet.