OpenAI co-founds Agentic AI Foundation, donates AGENTS.md

Today, OpenAI is co-founding the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)⁠(opens in a new window) under the Linux Foundation, alongside Anthropic and Block, and with the support of Google, Microsoft, AWS, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare. The AAIF is designed to provide neutral stewardship for open, interoperable infrastructure as agentic AI systems move from experimentation into real-world production.

As part of this effort, we’re contributing AGENTS.md⁠(opens in a new window)—a simple, open format for providing agents with project-specific instructions and context—to the foundation to ensure long-term support and adoption across the community.

Developers are rapidly adopting AI to build more capable agentic systems—from coding assistants to workflow automation and customer service agents. In 2025, these systems have begun to move from prototypes into tools that handle real work in business and consumer settings.

We believe the transition from experimental agents to real-world systems will best work at scale if there are open standards that help make them interoperable. Open standards make agents safer, easier to build, and more portable across tools and platforms—and help prevent the ecosystem from fragmenting as this new category matures.

As more agents begin handling real responsibility, the cost of fragmentation increases. Without common conventions and neutral governance, agent development risks diverging into incompatible silos that limit portability, safety, and progress.

AAIF was created to address this moment.

Over the past year, OpenAI has made significant contributions to building agentic infrastructure in the open—working alongside developers, researchers, and other companies across the ecosystem to prove that open protocols can work in practice.

We’ve contributed core building blocks including the Agents SDK⁠(opens in a new window), the Apps SDK⁠(opens in a new window), and the Agentic Commerce Protocol⁠(opens in a new window), as well as open-source efforts like our gpt-oss models⁠ and the Codex CLI⁠(opens in a new window). The Codex CLI alone has now been used to help merge more than two million public pull requests on GitHub.

We’ve also been early adopters and core contributors to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), incorporating it as the foundation for connectors⁠(opens in a new window) and apps in ChatGPT⁠. Just last week, we announced a collaboration with Anthropic and MCP-UI to extend the Apps SDK to all MCP developers through MCP Apps⁠(opens in a new window)—making it easier to build interactive, agent-powered experiences across platforms.

These efforts laid the groundwork for AAIF by demonstrating that open, interoperable infrastructure can gain real adoption across tools and communities.

AGENTS.md began as a practical solution to a familiar problem. Codex needed a predictable way to find project-specific instructions—such as coding conventions, build steps, and testing requirements—to help agents work safely and effectively in a codebase.

With AGENTS.md⁠(opens in a new window), we introduced a lightweight Markdown file designed to live alongside README.md⁠(opens in a new window). It offers a simple, interoperable standard that gives AI coding agents a consistent source of project-specific guidance needed to operate reliably across different repositories and toolchains. This markdown-based convention makes agent behavior far more predictable across diverse repositories and build systems.

What began as an internal solution quickly resonated across the ecosystem. Since its release in August 2025, AGENTS.md has been adopted by more than 60,000 open-source projects and agent frameworks including Amp, Codex, Cursor, Devin, Factory, Gemini CLI, Github Copilot, Jules and VS Code among others—reflecting growing alignment around shared, vendor-neutral conventions as agents enter production.

Contributing AGENTS.md to the AAIF ensures that:

• Developers and enterprises have a portable way to provide agents with the context they need
• The format can evolve in the open, with input from many tools and communities
• No single company controls its direction as adoption continues to grow

In addition to AGENTS.md⁠(opens in a new window), the AAIF co-founders will each be contributing a project to the foundation: Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP)⁠(opens in a new window) and Block’s goose⁠(opens in a new window).

The AAIF provides a neutral home where agent interoperability standards can be developed, governed, and extended collaboratively. Our goal for the AAIF is simple: establish a shared, neutral platform for building agentic systems that benefit developers, enterprises, and the broader open-source community.

AAIF operates as a directed fund under the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization with decades of experience stewarding critical open-source projects including the Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, Node.js, and PyTorch. The Linux Foundation brings proven expertise in neutral governance, community building, and maintaining long-term sustainability for widely adopted technologies—ensuring no single company controls the direction of foundational infrastructure.

Established by OpenAI, Block⁠(opens in a new window), Anthropic⁠(opens in a new window), Google⁠(opens in a new window), Microsoft⁠(opens in a new window), Amazon⁠(opens in a new window) and Bloomberg⁠(opens in a new window), and Cloudflare⁠(opens in a new window), the Agentic AI Foundation is designed to help agentic AI evolve transparently, collaboratively, and in the public interest through shared investment, open development, and community-led standards.

We welcome contributors of all kinds—tool builders, researchers, enterprises, and individual developers—to help shape and extend this work. Learn more about AGENTS.md⁠(opens in a new window) and get involved with the AAIF here⁠(opens in a new window).