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NewsMaterial3 min readDisconfirmAI Editorial

AAIF Executive Director Mazin Gilbert: Standards Bodies Must Move Faster Than Members or Become Irrelevant

Mazin Gilbert, executive director of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), explains why the foundation faces unique time pressure—companies building agents will release products with or without standards—and describes the mechanism that brings competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google together to develop protocols while competing on products: mutual dependence on shared infrastructure.

2026-11-04 06:50 GMT+8

Mazin Gilbert left Google in 2026 to join the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation as executive director. During an interview with The New Stack podcast at the AGNTCon + MCPCon conference in San Jose, he made a core judgment: if the foundation does not move at the speed of light, it will become irrelevant.

The source of this speed pressure is specific. Gilbert says that companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google will build products with standards and also build products without them. Standards bodies are not writing specifications in a vacuum; they are racing against time. Once a company has already deployed its own integration code, a standard that arrives later leaves customers with legacy code that they must maintain themselves.

So what is the mechanism that gets fiercely competing companies to sit down and co-develop protocols? Gilbert’s answer points to infrastructure interdependence: these protocols are the air you breathe, the plumbing. They may not be sexy, but if we don’t get them right, the entire agentic AI space will become a mess, expensive, and basically prohibitive for any company to deploy at scale. Before our recording, he had just met with a group of maintainers from very fiercely competing companies who were working on the protocols together. All of those companies depend on these standards, so they have a reason to get the work done.

Adoption data for MCP seems to support this mechanism. Gilbert notes that MCP downloads grew tenfold in the first 10 months after Anthropic donated the protocol to the foundation last December. Today, fewer than 15 percent of MCP maintainers work at Anthropic, and more than 1,000 organizations contribute 75 percent of pull requests. The July update to the MCP specification made the protocol stateless. Gilbert says every company not only contributed to it but completely updated their entire tech stack to adapt to stateless MCP.

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The AAIF currently has 305 members. Gilbert says about one new company joins every business day, calling it the fastest-growing foundation in the Linux Foundation’s history. Forty percent of members are startups, and 19 percent are nonprofits, national labs, and academic institutions. Large companies tend to contribute the protocols themselves, while smaller companies build products on top of them—this is the opposite of the CNCF model, where many projects started at startups.

But Gilbert also admits that not all members are contributing. Some companies are still trying to understand what agents can do for them, and others don’t know how to contribute. He says a third group of companies frankly are panicking because they don’t yet have an agent strategy. In September, the foundation launched its first certification—the Model Context Protocol Associate (MCPA)—to help these companies get started.

An unresolved issue is gateway fragmentation. This year, the AAIF approved two gateway projects: Solo.io’s agentgateway and Agent Router, which migrated from the CNCF Envoy project in September. Gilbert says five or six more companies want to contribute their own gateways. Does the community need six or ten gateways, or do we need to harmonize them together? He doesn’t have an answer, and says the community doesn’t either. The foundation provides a neutral governance space for these companies to work it out together.

Gilbert is frank about the fact that none of us have done this before. He says we are learning as we go. This is both an honest statement of limitation and the fundamental uncertainty facing standard governance in this field: no one knows whether a protocol foundation jointly maintained by competing companies can truly keep up with the iteration speed of their respective products.

Sources

  • thenewstack.ioThe New Stack↗
  • siliconangle.comSiliconANGLE↗
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