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.

Why Open Standards Matter

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.

Building an Open Ecosystem

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.

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