Agentic AI Foundation Adds Agent Skills, Open Responses, OpenEnv and OpenSandbox, Taking It From Three Projects at Launch to 10 With 305 Members
The Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation says Anthropic, OpenAI, Hugging Face and Alibaba each contributed a project, bringing it to 10 hosted projects and 305 member organizations.
Overview
The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a Linux Foundation body, announced on October 22, 2026 four new hosted projects: Agent Skills, contributed by Anthropic; Open Responses, contributed by OpenAI; OpenEnv, contributed by Hugging Face; and OpenSandbox, contributed by Alibaba. According to the foundation, the additions bring it to 10 hosted projects in its first year, up from three launch projects in December 2025. A separate release the same day put total membership at 305 organizations.
What the Foundation Announced
The projects were announced at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America, held October 22-23 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, according to the Linux Foundation. The release describes each as covering a different layer of the agentic stack:
- Agent Skills is described as “an open format for giving agents new capabilities and domain expertise.”
- Open Responses is described as “an open specification for building multi-provider, interoperable LLM interfaces, based on the OpenAI Responses API.”
- OpenEnv is described as “an open framework and community hub for creating RL environments.”
- OpenSandbox is described as “a general-purpose sandbox platform for AI applications,” offering multi-language SDKs, unified sandbox APIs and Docker and Kubernetes runtimes.
They join the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, Agent Router, agentgateway, AGENTS.md, goose, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which the release says all operate “under AAIF’s open, vendor-neutral governance.” The New Stack reported that the foundation launched in December 2025 with MCP, goose and AGENTS.md as its first projects. The Machine Herald previously covered the foundation’s launch.
What the Contributors Said
Manik Surtani, the foundation’s CTO and co-founder, said in the release that “four different companies chose to contribute them to neutral governance,” and that the foundation’s job is giving the community one place to build shared standards “with no single company controlling the outcome.”
David Soria Parra, Co-Creator and Lead Maintainer of MCP at Anthropic, said in the release: “Today, we’re donating Agent Skills to the AAIF.” Xiaobin Xu, Head of Development Infrastructure at Alibaba, said: “While OpenSandbox was created at Alibaba, we don’t want its future to be defined by a single company.”
On governance mechanics, The New Stack reported that the foundation has “a technical steering committee, which will initially be made up of project maintainers, handling the technical discussions.” The release itself does not detail the committee’s structure.
Open Responses and Its Adoption
Open Responses drew the most detailed coverage. The New Stack reported that OpenAI announced on Thursday that it is donating the specification to the foundation. An OpenAI spokesperson told the outlet that “Vercel AI Gateway and Databricks Model Serving already implement it.”
The New Stack listed AWS (in Bedrock), Databricks, LM Studio, Ollama, Hugging Face, Nvidia, OpenRouter, Red Hat and Vercel, plus open source projects such as vLLM and OGC (previously Llama Stack), as supporters. It noted that Anthropic, which defines its own Messages API, is not on that list, though “Anthropic is a member of the AAIF.” It added that Google has its own Interactions API. The outlet also reported that the project’s contributor guide notes its core schema files “are copied from OpenAI’s API,” a lineage relevant to how neutral the specification’s origins are, although governance now sits with the foundation.
Membership Growth
In a separate release, the foundation said it added 7 Gold Members, 33 Silver Members and 18 Associate Members in the past quarter, bringing total membership to 305 organizations. The new Gold Members are Ant Group, Gates Foundation, MongoDB, Nutanix, Royal Bank of Canada, Vercel and Vultr. New Associate Members include Mozilla Corporation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
The release’s summary says 60 new member organizations joined this quarter, while the itemized counts in the body sum to 58; the release does not explain the difference.
Mazin Gilbert, the foundation’s Executive Director, said in that release: “These organizations are asking how agents authenticate, how their actions are verified, and who is accountable when one acts on their behalf.”
What We Don’t Know
- The release does not say how project governance, trademarks or maintainer seats will change for the four newly hosted projects.
- Whether Anthropic or Google will adopt Open Responses is not stated in the sources; The New Stack only noted they are absent from the supporter list.
- Both foundation announcements are the foundation’s own press releases; The New Stack is the only independent outlet among the cited sources, and it covered only Open Responses in detail.