The race to deploy AI agents in enterprise environments is moving faster than the infrastructure supporting them. Now, the organization tasked with fixing that – the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) – has hit 190 member organizations, and AI engineering company Solvd is among the latest to join.
AAIF announced on May 18 the addition of 43 new members across financial services, government, academia, and enterprise technology, with Solvd confirmed as a new Silver Member.
The foundation, launched by the Linux Foundation in December 2025 with founding contributions from Anthropic and OpenAI, is the neutral body developing the open standards and protocols that will govern how AI agents connect, communicate, and operate in production environments. Its three flagship projects are Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), OpenAI’s AGENTS.md, and Block’s open-source agent framework goose.
The scale of AAIF’s growth signals just how seriously enterprises are treating the standards question. As OpenAI noted at AAIF’s formation, without common conventions and neutral governance, agent development risks diverging into incompatible silos that limit portability, safety, and progress – a fragmentation problem that becomes exponentially more expensive to unwind the further adoption advances without agreed infrastructure.
Why now, and why MCP
For enterprises trying to deploy AI agents across complex technology stacks, the core practical problem is integration.
Before MCP, connecting an AI agent to the tools and data sources a business actually runs on required a custom integration for every combination of model and platform. Since its release in November 2024, AGENTS.md has been adopted by more than 60,000 open-source projects and agent frameworks including Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, and VS Code, a sign of how quickly the ecosystem has converged around shared conventions when they’re available.
MCP has followed a similar trajectory. The protocol now has 110 million-plus monthly downloads and an ecosystem spanning thousands of active servers, with support from every major AI platform. As CIO Dive reported, MCP adoption is expected to accelerate further among enterprises in 2026, with its transfer to Linux Foundation governance seen as a “net positive for the protocol’s future.”
Solvd’s engineering leaders will contribute to AAIF working groups focused on MCP implementation, AGENTS.md, and open-source agent tooling, bringing a production perspective that is central to what AAIF needs from its members.
What Solvd brings to the table
The company’s profile sits at an unusual intersection. With 700+ engineers serving more than 100 enterprise clients across technology, fintech, e-commerce, hospitality, and banking, Solvd has direct, ongoing exposure to where agentic deployments succeed in production and where they break down.
That operational depth is backed by serious research credentials: over 100 published papers, more than 15 PhDs on staff, contributions at NeurIPS, ICML, and CVPR, and a NeurIPS 2025 Best Paper Award winner.
Solvd was built through the acquisitions of EastBanc Technologies and Tooploox.
“We are excited to offer our experiences and research to this important effort to ensure robust and safe AI solutions are deployed,” said Solvd CEO Mike Hulbert.
Solvd CTO Skylar Roebuck added: “The standards we set now will define what’s possible for years to come. We’re joining AAIF to help build that foundation alongside the industry’s leaders.”
Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, has similarly described MCP, AGENTS.md, and goose as having become “essential tools for developers building this new class of agentic technologies”, adding that bringing them under AAIF ensures they “can grow with the transparency and stability that only open governance provides.”
Solvd engineers will participate in two key AAIF events: the MCP Dev Summit Europe in Amsterdam on September 17–18 and AGNTCon + MCPCon in San Jose on October 22–23.
Featured image: Via the Agentic AI Foundation
Disclosure: This article mentions clients of an Espacio portfolio company.
