According to TheRegister.com, on Tuesday, the Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) to provide vendor-neutral oversight for AI agent infrastructure. The founding members, Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, have each contributed a project: the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open-source framework goose, and AGENTS.md. This move comes despite IT consultancy Gartner’s prediction that many agent-based enterprise projects will be canceled for lacking business value and a series of high-profile security failures. For instance, Google’s Antigravity agent wiped a developer’s drive, and Replit’s agent erased a production database in July. Yet, investment continues, with Virgin Atlantic launching an agent-based virtual Concierge on Monday, and Gartner predicting AI sales agents will outnumber humans 10-to-1 by 2028, even while forecasting less than 40% of sellers will see productivity gains.
The Open Governance Play
So here’s the Linux Foundation, stepping in to be the “Switzerland” for a chaotic and risky frontier. The idea is classic open-source playbook: take competing, proprietary interests and give them a neutral table to build common infrastructure. Projects like the Model Context Protocol are exactly that—a protocol for how large language models can safely talk to other software tools. It’s an attempt to build guardrails *before* the industry fully careens off the cliff. Jim Zemlin’s quote about “transparency and stability” is the standard line, but in this case, it’s addressing a real fear. When any AI agent can be given the keys to your browser or your database, you want those protocols to be rock-solid and not controlled by a single vendor who might change the rules on a whim.
The Hype vs. Reality Problem
But let’s be real. The announcement’s enthusiastic quotes are completely at odds with the current state of agentic AI. We’re not talking about minor bugs. We’re talking about agents that completely trash systems. Gartner isn’t just skeptical; they’ve called for corporate bans on agentic *browsers*, which is a pretty dramatic stance. And Microsoft reportedly lowering growth targets for its Azure agent-building tools, as covered by The Information, hints that customer adoption might be hitting a wall. The business value proposition is still super fuzzy. Is an AI sales agent that might annoy customers and requires constant babysitting really an improvement?
Why Companies Are Charging Ahead Anyway
So why is Virgin Atlantic launching a concierge agent, and why are firms like Appdome and EPAM pushing their own agentic services? FOMO, mostly. And because the investor money is still flowing for anything with “AI agent” attached to it. They’re looking at that 2028 forecast and don’t want to be left behind. Virgin’s use of OpenAI’s Realtime API for trip planning is a relatively low-stakes test—better than letting an agent loose on critical infrastructure. But it shows the dichotomy: the tech is both incredibly promising and dangerously immature. Everyone’s trying to build the plane while it’s already rolling down the runway.
What The Foundation Actually Needs To Do
The AAIF’s success won’t be measured by how many projects it hosts, but by whether it can actually impose discipline. Can it establish real security standards that companies adhere to? Can it create benchmarks for what “business value” even means for an agent? Right now, it’s a collection of interesting tech pieces—a protocol, a framework, a machine-readable README file. The hard part is turning that into a trusted ecosystem. If they can’t, we’ll just see more headlines about wiped databases and lowered sales quotas. The foundation is a necessary idea, but the agentic AI train is moving fast. Building the tracks under it, in open source, is a huge challenge. Let’s see if they can pull it off.
