MCP is not one vendor's protocol any more

The most common objection we heard about MCP in its first year was not technical. It was that the protocol belonged to one AI company, and building your integration surface on a competitor's standard is a bet you cannot easily unwind. That objection has an answer now.

What happened

In December 2025 the protocol was donated to the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation, under the Linux Foundation. Membership has grown steadily through 2026, reported in the hundreds by the middle of the year. More importantly than the headcount, the specification now moves through a public process with a published roadmap and an explicit deprecation policy.

Why governance is the part that matters

A protocol owned by a single vendor is a roadmap risk: the thing you built against can be repriced, deprioritised or quietly folded into a product tier. Foundation governance plus a minimum twelve-month deprecation window is not a guarantee of anything, but it is the difference between planning and hoping. It is why we were comfortable making MCP a first-class product on our platform rather than an integration.

What it does not change

Standardisation is not safety. The same ecosystem that now has open governance also has a large share of public servers that skip the specification's mandatory OAuth. A standard tells you what good looks like; it does not make anybody implement it.

For a buyer, the practical upshot is that publishing an MCP server is no longer a bet on one client winning. You publish once and every compliant client can connect — which is exactly the property you wanted from a standard in the first place.