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By Vijoy Pandey, Senior Vice President of Outshift by Cisco

AGNTCY is moving to the Linux Foundation with Cisco, Dell Technologies, Google Cloud, Oracle and Red Hat joining as formative members, alongside 75+ companies that have been contributing to and supporting AGNTCY.

Here’s why this matters: While single agents can handle specific tasks, the real power comes when specialized agents collaborate across multiple frameworks, vendors, and deployment environments to solve complex problems — just like humans do in the real world.

From IT deployments that coordinate ServiceNow tickets, Cisco networks, and Salesforce customer data to drug discovery pipelines that connect protein modelling agents with automated wet-lab robots; enterprises want to agentify work spanning multiple software systems.

But in order to build these collaborative systems, agents need to be able to find each other, verify their identities, and share context without expensive custom integration work.

Agentic AI is now at the same inflection point the early internet faced. Brilliant individual systems that can’t talk to each other, where every agent is its own island – until common protocols emerge.

Why fix this now

Since our March launch along with Galileo and LangChain, this fragmentation has only been accelerating, with every platform building its own discovery systems, identity frameworks, and messaging protocols. The missing piece isn't smarter agents — it's building the Internet of Agents: an open, interoperable, agent-to-agent, quantum-safe infrastructure. This would allow any agent to work with any other agent, regardless of who built it or where it runs.

AGNTCY has been solving this through specs, working code, and services on GitHub. We've built the discovery layer (think DNS for agents), identity systems (tamper-proof passports), secure messaging optimized for agent communication, and observability frameworks that understand probabilistic systems.

We are very proud to donate AGNTCY to ensure it belongs to the community that builds with it. The Linux Foundation provides neutral governance that enterprises trust and a proven sustainability model that keeps critical projects alive.

What we're contributing

AGNTCY is a complete framework that addresses the multi-agent software lifecycle, from build to runtime. We're donating the entire stack:

• Agent Discovery - Our Open Agent Schema Framework (OASF), a standard to record agent capabilities and dependencies, plus a decentralized Agent Directory. Think DNS-like discovery for agents — any agent can discover and understand what other agents can do and include them in agentic workflows to accomplish tasks.
• Agent Identity - Cryptographically verifiable identities and tool-based access control for autonomous agents. This enables agents to prove who they are and perform authorized actions across vendor and organizational boundaries.
• Agent Messaging - SLIM (Secure Low-latency Interactive Messaging) handles agent, human, and tool communication patterns in low-latency, multi-modal data exchange, human-in-the-loop interactions, and quantum-safe security by design.
• Agent Observability - Framework, data schema and SDK that incorporate the probabilistic nature of AI agents and provide end-to-end visibility across multi-agent, multi-vendor, multi-organization workflows.
• Protocol Integration - We're making AGNTCY building blocks interoperable with Agent 2 Agent (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP). A2A-enabled agents and MCP servers can be discovered through AGNTCY directories, transport messages over SLIM, and be monitored with AGNTCY observability SDKs.

A complete multi-agent system needs all these pieces working together. Discovery without identity is useless. Messaging without observability is blind. Protocols that synergistically work together. The goal is agent collaboration that just works.

AGNTCY members are joining because they're already solving these problems for their customers. Here is what three members, Dell Technologies, Google Cloud and Red Hat are saying:

Dell Technologies: "Interoperability is central to Dell's agentic AI vision. The ability of agents to work together empowers enterprises to reap the full value of AI. Additionally, interworking technologies must accommodate agents wherever they are deployed whether in public clouds, private data centers, the edge or on devices. Dell is working hand-in-hand with industry leaders to establish open standards for agentic interoperability. Being a formative member of the Linux Foundation AGNTCY project is one such step towards fulfilling the promise of agentic AI." —John Roese, Global Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Officer, Dell Technologies. 

Google Cloud:  "Open, community-driven standards are essential for creating a diverse, interoperable agentic AI ecosystem. We're pleased that Cisco is moving AGNTCY to the Linux Foundation, where it will be neutrally governed alongside the Agent2Agent protocol to advance powerful, collaborative agent systems for the industry." — Rao Surapaneni, Vice President, Business Applications Platform, Google Cloud. 

Red Hat: "Our customers and partners, as well as the open-source communities we work with, are actively exploring agentic capabilities to bring the inferencing benefits of vLLM and llm-d to their applications. Red Hat welcomes AGNTCY's move to the Linux Foundation, and we look forward to working with the community to help bring open, agnostic governance to the agentic AI ecosystem." —Steve Watt, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer, Office of the CTO, Red Hat.

Why neutral governance matters

Building open and decentralized infrastructure is never a one-company job. The Linux Foundation provides the neutral governance that enterprises trust and the sustainability model that keeps critical projects alive. It's where countless projects like Kubernetes and PyTorch have transitioned from single-vendor initiatives to industry-wide standards.

As noted by Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, the AGNTCY project lays groundwork for secure, interoperable collaboration among autonomous agents.

AGNTCY’s move to the Linux Foundation ensures the community makes technical decisions, organizations can trust the long-term roadmap, and contributors can focus on building.