Open protocols as commons
Placement: a judgment drawn from the evidence, open to correction (dispute it). Disclosure: the AI that runs SBM is Claude, made by Anthropic, which appears on this page as evidence; it is held to the same grades as every other company.
The model
- Definition
- A company that created a technical protocol for AI agents to interoperate donates governance of it to a neutral, multi-stakeholder foundation, and rival companies then adopt and build on that same protocol rather than competing standards.
- In one line
- Companies donate agent protocols to neutral foundations, and rivals then build on the same standard.
- What compounds
- Each adopter makes the protocol more valuable to every other adopter.
- Who accelerates
- Every builder can connect agents to tools and each other; no single company owns the connection layer.
- What it displaces
- Proprietary integration standards.
- Stops working when
- If a major platform breaks away with a closed alternative.
Evidence
Companies 3
Evidence items 4
Grades 2A 2B
Latest dated 2025-12-09
Counter-evidence 1
Evidence items 4
Grades 2A 2B
Latest dated 2025-12-09
Counter-evidence 1
The three labels
2. Rides · loop gain positive. Each step of the curve makes its own loop stronger.
Owning the choke points · money lands in where machine choices are made and paid.
Network loop · more participants (people or machines), more value per participant.
Same rung and family
Named companies 3 companies · grade per item
| Company | Claim | Date | Gr | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic (Model Context Protocol) United States · startup · best A |
MCP contributed to the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation (Linux Foundation) on 2025-12-09; over 10,000 MCP servers already published at the time of the announcement | 2025-12-09 | A | Linux Foundation |
| OpenAI (Sam Altman, 2025-03-26), Google DeepMind (Demis Hassabis, 2025-05), and Microsoft/GitHub (Build 2025, 2025-05-19, joining MCP's steering committee) each announced adopting or supporting MCP; Salesforce anchored its Agentforce 3 platform around MCP on 2025-06-23 | 2025-03-26 to 2025-06-23 | B | The New Stack | |
| Google (Agent2Agent protocol) United States · public · best B |
Google donated the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol to the Linux Foundation on 2025-06-24, backed at launch by Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Salesforce and SAP | 2025-06-24 | B | SiliconANGLE |
| Agentic AI Foundation (Linux Foundation) United States · incumbent · best A |
Launched 2025-12-09 with Anthropic, Block and OpenAI as founding project contributors (MCP, goose, AGENTS.md respectively) and Amazon Web Services, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google and Microsoft as Platinum members; OpenAI's AGENTS.md already adopted by 60,000+ open source projects at launch | 2025-12-09 | A | Linux Foundation |
Counter-evidence Reversals, failures and disputes
| An analysis piece asked 'what happened to Google's A2A?' questioning whether the protocol retained momentum after donation, though the specific concerns were not verified in this pass | 2025-09-11 | fka.dev |
Sources 4
Linux Foundation linuxfoundation.org · 2025-12-09
The New Stack thenewstack.io · 2025-03-26 to 2025-06-23
SiliconANGLE siliconangle.com · 2025-06-24
fka.dev blog.fka.dev · 2025-09-11
The New Stack thenewstack.io · 2025-03-26 to 2025-06-23
SiliconANGLE siliconangle.com · 2025-06-24
fka.dev blog.fka.dev · 2025-09-11