The protocol passes into shared ownership
Anthropic gave the Model Context Protocol to a newly formed foundation under the Linux Foundation; OpenAI and Block were co-founders, with support from Google, Microsoft, AWS and Cloudflare.
Why it matters
The way models connect to the world stopped belonging to a company, in its second year and after a hundred million downloads a month.
Within a year the protocol had become standard: about 97 million library downloads a month, more than ten thousand active servers, support in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Cursor and Visual Studio Code. Keeping such a standard inside one company was no longer possible, because competitors do not build on someone else's. Handing it to a foundation with neutral governance resolved that the way it was resolved for the Linux kernel or Kubernetes: a shared thing lives where it has no owner.