alt Hacker NewsDonating the Model Context Protocol and establishing the Agentic AI Foundation
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It really feels to me that MCP is a fad. Tool calling seems like the overwhelming use case, but a dedicated protocol that goes through arbitrary runtimes is massive overkill
Contrary to what a lot of the other comments here are claiming, I don't think that's the mark of death for MCP and Anthropic trying to get rid of it.
From the announcement and keeping up with the RFCs for MCP, it's pretty obvious that a lot of the main players in AI are actively working with MCP and are trying to advance the standard. At some point or another those companies probably (more or less forcefully) approached Anthropic to put MCP under a neutral body, as long-term pouring resources into a standard that your competitor controls is a dumb idea.
I also don't think the Linux Foundation has become the same "donate your project to die" dumping ground that the Apache Software Foundation was for some time (especially for Facebook). There are some implications that come with it like conference-ification and establishing certificates programs, which aren't purely good, but overall most multi-party LF/CNCF projects have been doing fairly well.
Anthropic wants to ditch MCP and not be on the hook for it in the future -- but lots of enterprises haven't realized its a dumb, vibe coded standard that is missing so much. They need to hand the hot potato off to someone else.
Interestingly, Google already donated its own AgentToAgent (A2A) protocol to the Linux donation way earlier this year.
> "Since its inception, we’ve been committed to ensuring MCP remains open-source, community-driven and vendor-neutral. Today, we further that commitment by donating MCP to the Linux Foundation."
Interesting move by Anthropic! Seems clever although curious if MCP will succeed long-term or not given this.
I think the focus should be on more and better APIs, not MCP servers.
say MCP is a dead-end without saying it's dead.
I really like Claude models, but I abhor the management at Anthropic. Kinda like Apple.
They never open sourced any models, not even once.
MCP is overly complicated. I'd rather use something like https://utcp.io/
Kinda weird/unexpected to see goose by block as a founding partner. I am aware of them but did not realize their importance when it comes to MCP.
Is the Linux Foundation basically a dumping ground for projects that corporations no longer want to finance but still keep control over?
Facebook still has de facto control over PyTorch.
This sounds more like anthropic giving up on mcp than it does a good faith donation to open source.
Anthropic will move onto bigger projects and other teams/companies will be stuck with sunk cost fallacy to try and get mcp to work for them.
Good luck to everyone.
I'm pretty sure there are more MCP servers than there are users of MCP servers.
I hope MCP will prosper inside this new structure! Block donating Goose is a bit more worrisome - it feels like they are throwing it away into the graveyard.
i thought skills are the new context resolver
Foundation release: https://aaif.io/press/linux-foundation-announces-the-formati...
OpenAI post: https://openai.com/index/agentic-ai-foundation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46207383)
gg anthropic
I can specify and use tools with an LLM without MCP, so why do I need MCP?
Donate?! Pshawh………more like vibe manage it yourself lol
Leaving aside the mediocre reputation of the Linux Foundation, is it true that everyone moving away from MCP and towards Claude Skills at this point?
It feels far too early for a protocol that's barely a year old with so much turbulence to be donated into its own foundation under the LF.
Alot of people don't realize this, but the foundations that wrap up to the LF have revenue pipelines that are supported by those foundations events (like Kubecon brings in ALOT of money for the CNCF), courses, certifications, etc. And, by proxy, the projects support those revenue streams for the foundations they're in. The flywheel is _supposed_ to be that companies donate to the foundation, those companies support the projects with engineering resources, they get a booth at the event for marketing, and the LF can ensure the health and well-being of the ecosystem and foundation through technical oversight committees, elections, a service-desk, owning the domains, etc.
I don't see how MCP supports that revenue stream nor does it seem like a good idea at this stage: why get a certification for "Certified MCP Developer" when the protocol is evolving so quickly and we've yet to figure how OAuth is going to work in a sane manner?
Mature projects like Kuberentes becoming the backbone of a foundation, like it did with CNCF, makes alot of sense: it was a relatively proven technology at Google that had alot of practical use cases for the emerging world of "cloud" and containers. MCP, at least for me, has not yet proven it's robustness as a mature and stable project: I'd put it into the "sandbox" category of projects which are still rapidly evolving and proving their value. I would have much preferred for Anthropic and a small strike team of engaged developers to move fast and fix alot of the issues in the protocol vs. it getting donated and slowing to a crawl.