Who Owns Model Context Protocol? The Foundation, the Board and the 8 Who Decide

The Linux Foundation now owns the Model Context Protocol, through an Agentic AI Foundation that had 146 member companies by February 2026. None of those companies can vote on the specification. That power sits with 8 named individuals, and the 2 at the top still hold a veto over everything below them. If your product talks to agents, those 8 people decide the shape of your integration layer.

What Model Context Protocol is, and why its owner matters to you

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for connecting AI applications to external tools, data and services. A SaaS vendor builds one MCP server, and any compliant agent can discover and call that product's functions. That is the whole pitch, and it worked.

By the time Anthropic donated it, MCP had over 97 million monthly SDK downloads and 10,000 active servers, with client support in ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and VS Code. The adoption story and the plumbing are covered in our explainer on how MCP became the agent interoperability standard. This post covers the question that explainer only touched: who now decides what MCP becomes.

That question is commercial, not academic. Whoever controls the protocol controls the shape of the door agents use to reach your product. A spec change can force a server rebuild, as the July 2026 revision did. The rebuild work is laid out in our tracker of which SaaS incumbents ship MCP servers and in the migration checklist linked further down.

Our position is simple. If your integration roadmap depends on MCP, you need the org chart in your head as clearly as you need the API reference.

Who owns Model Context Protocol after the donation

On 9 December 2025 the Linux Foundation announced the Agentic AI Foundation, abbreviated AAIF. It launched with three founding project contributions: Anthropic's MCP, Block's goose agent framework, and OpenAI's AGENTS.md instruction file format. Anthropic, Block and OpenAI are described as co-founders.

The MCP maintainers described the legal form precisely. The AAIF is "a directed fund under the Linux Foundation". The protocol's own site footer now reads "Model Context Protocol a Series of LF Projects, LLC". In plain terms, the trademark, the infrastructure and the budget sit with a Linux Foundation entity, not with Anthropic.

What did not move is the technical decision-making. The donation post put it in a heading: "MCP's maintainer structure stays the same". It added that the Linux Foundation "will not dictate the technical direction of MCP". Anthropic's Chief Product Officer, Mike Krieger, said in the launch release that the company remains "committed to supporting and advancing MCP".

So there are two layers of ownership, and they answer to different rules. One layer holds money and membership. The other holds the specification. Most coverage of the donation collapsed the two into one sentence, which is how readers came away believing that Google or Microsoft now co-own the spec. They co-fund the foundation. That is a different thing.

The Agentic AI Foundation member list, tier by tier

The launch release named 8 Platinum members: Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. It listed 18 Gold members, including Cisco, Datadog, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, Shopify and Snowflake. It also listed 23 Silver members, from Hugging Face and Uber to Zapier and WorkOS.

That is 49 organisations at launch, by our count of the names in the release. On 24 February 2026 the foundation added 18 Gold and 79 Silver members, for a stated total of 146. The new Gold intake included American Express, JPMorgan Chase, Red Hat, ServiceNow, UiPath and Workato. Mistral AI and 1Password were among the new Silver members.

Platinum is a closed club of 8

The AAIF membership page lists exactly 8 Platinum members, and the same 8 hold board seats. The fee schedule we read on that page put Platinum at $350,000 a year for existing Linux Foundation members, and Gold at $200,000. Treat those as directional. We read the fee table through a page summary rather than verbatim text, and the page itself showed an inconsistent Platinum figure.

The useful point is structural rather than financial. The 8 companies that funded the foundation at launch are the 8 companies with a direct board seat today. New money since then has bought a seat in the hall, not at the table.

Six projects now, not one

The foundation launched as a home for 3 projects and now lists 6. Agent2Agent, the agent-to-agent protocol Google launched in April 2025, joined as a hosted project on 17 August 2026. The foundation says A2A has more than 150 partner organisations. The others are agentgateway, a connectivity proxy for agents and tools, and Agent Router, which Bloomberg and Tetrate engineers started on Envoy.

This matters for MCP in a way the announcements do not spell out. MCP now shares a budget, a board and a technical committee with a protocol that solves an adjacent problem. The foundation frames them as layers: MCP connects agents to tools, A2A connects agents to each other. We think that framing holds today, and we would watch for the moment it stops holding.

What the AAIF governing board controls, and what it cannot touch

The MCP maintainers set out the division of labour in one sentence. The AAIF Governing Board decides "strategic investments, budget allocation, member recruitment, and approval of new projects". Individual projects keep "full autonomy over their technical direction and day-to-day operations".

The board listed on the foundation's site has 10 people. Its chair is David Nalley of AWS, appointed in February 2026. Google's April Kyle Nassi is treasurer. The other Platinum representatives come from Microsoft, OpenAI, Cloudflare, Anthropic, Bloomberg and Block. Zhong Wu of Shopify holds the Gold Member Representative seat, and Matt Vasey, a senior advisor at the Gates Foundation, holds the tenth.

Notice who Anthropic sent. Its board member is Linzy McCartney, listed as IP Counsel. That is a reasonable choice for a company that has just given away a trademark, and it says something about where Anthropic expects the board's work to be.

Board and committee membership from aaif.io/about, read 21 October 2026. Maintainer roles from MCP's governance page and MAINTAINERS.md, updated 1 October 2026.

The technical committee is the least documented body

The AAIF site names a 4-person Technical Committee, chaired by David Soria Parra of Anthropic. The other members are Caitie McCaffrey of Microsoft, Bradley Axen of Block, who created goose, and Nick Cooper of OpenAI. We found no published charter, formation date or decision record for it on the foundation's site.

That is a gap worth naming. For MCP specifically, the maintainers' own documents say technical direction stays inside the project. What a foundation-level technical committee does across six projects is not written down anywhere we could find.

How MCP governance decides the specification

The protocol's governance page defines four tiers. Contributors file issues and pull requests. Maintainers run working groups, SDKs and components. Core Maintainers "steer the MCP specification and overall project direction", and can veto Maintainer decisions by majority vote.

At the top, Lead Maintainers "hold final authority and can veto any decision by Core Maintainers or Maintainers". The page calls the role what it is: "Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL)". Lead Maintainers also appoint and remove Core Maintainers, and administer all project infrastructure.

The current roster, per MAINTAINERS.md updated on 1 October 2026, is David Soria Parra and Den Delimarsky as Lead Maintainers. The Core Maintainers are Peter Alexander, Caitie McCaffrey, Kurtis Van Gent, Clare Liguori, Paul Carleton and Nick Cooper. Justin Spahr-Summers, MCP's co-inventor, is listed as Lead Maintainer Emeritus.

The SEP path is the only door into the spec

Every change to the specification goes through a Specification Enhancement Proposal, or SEP. The SEP guidelines require a linked prior discussion and a sponsor, who must be a Maintainer or Core Maintainer. A proposal without a sponsor for 6 months goes dormant.

Core Maintainers review SEPs every 2 weeks and decide. Acceptance requires "a prototype implementation", "clear benefit to the MCP ecosystem" and "community support and consensus". Standards Track SEPs also need a conformance test before they reach final status. There is no formal appeal against rejection; the guidelines suggest addressing feedback, asking in Discord, or submitting a competing SEP.

The BDFL veto survived the donation

This is the fact most coverage missed. The Linux Foundation now owns the trademark, but the governance rules inside the project kept a dictator at the top. SEP-2085, created on 5 December 2025, four days before the donation was announced, fixed how that role passes on.

If a Lead Maintainer leaves, any remaining Lead Maintainer appoints the successor. If none remain, Core Maintainers appoint one by majority vote within 30 days. Amendments to the governance structure "may only be proposed by Lead Maintainers" and need a two-thirds majority of all Core Maintainers. In other words, the 2 people at the top control whether the rules about the people at the top can change.

We do not read that as sinister. A protocol shipping breaking changes needs someone who can end an argument. But it means the honest answer to "who owns MCP" has two parts: the Linux Foundation owns the asset, and 2 individuals hold the final technical say.

What MCP governance actually changed since December 2025

The donation post said "for MCP little changes", and on the decision-making layer that proved accurate. The changes that did arrive came from inside the project, and several matter more to a SaaS vendor than the donation itself.

Deprecation became a rule, with a 12-month clock

The 2026-07-28 specification adopted SEP-2596, a feature lifecycle policy. It defines Active, Deprecated and Removed states and sets "a minimum twelve-month deprecation window". The same revision formalised the SEP workflow as pull requests with numbered markdown files, under SEP-1850.

For a vendor, this is the most valuable governance change of the year. Before it, a breaking change arrived when the maintainers decided. Now the earliest removal date is knowable in advance. What that revision asks of server owners is covered step by step in our MCP 2026 spec migration checklist.

The August 2026 roadmap added one more lever. It names 5 priority areas, each owned by specific Core Maintainers. SEPs inside those areas "get expedited review and have the best chance of acceptance", while "maintainer review time is scarce and goes to these areas first". The roadmap is now the queue, and the people who write it decide what reaches the front.

Where the separation between money and spec is thin

The design keeps company seats on one side and individuals on the other. The people, though, cross the line. We matched the names on the AAIF board and technical committee against MCP's maintainer roster. Here is what overlaps.

Employers as listed on aaif.io/about. MAINTAINERS.md lists no employers, so affiliations for the other 5 MCP Core and Lead Maintainers are not shown here. Roadmap ownership from modelcontextprotocol.io/development/roadmap, updated 22 August 2026.

So 2 of the 10 board members hold binding MCP votes. 3 of the 4 technical committee members are MCP maintainers, and its chair holds the Lead veto. In practice the same small group writes the spec, oversees the foundation's technical work and sits on the body that approves budgets.

The rule that "membership in the technical governance process is for individuals, not companies" is real. It is also a rule about seats, not about payroll. A Core Maintainer employed by a Platinum member is still an employee of that member. Our view is that buyers should stop treating "vendor-neutral" as a binary and start treating it as a ratio they can check.

Where this argument is weakest

We have argued that power over MCP is more concentrated than the donation headlines suggested. Here is the strongest case against that reading.

Small overlapping groups are normal in young standards. The people who understand a protocol well enough to write it are the same people every company wants on its committees. Overlap can mean competence rather than capture, and nothing in the public record shows a contested SEP being decided against the community's interest.

The cross-company spread is also genuine. The 3 overlapping MCP people work for Anthropic, Microsoft and OpenAI, three direct competitors. A protocol steered by rivals who must agree is arguably more neutral than one steered by any single foundation staff. And Anthropic's position did shrink: it went from sole owner to one of 8 board seats and, on our verified count, one of at least three employers among the 8 maintainers.

We could not verify most maintainer employers

This is the hole in our own evidence. MAINTAINERS.md lists names and GitHub handles, not employers. We confirmed affiliations for 3 of the 8 from the AAIF site. For the other 5 we did not find a primary source during this research, so we have not counted them. A full employer tally could make the concentration look worse or better than the table above, and we do not know which.

The governance model is also untested under stress. The donation is 10 months old, and the 12-month deprecation clock has not yet run out for the first deprecated features. Judge this structure again after the first removal and the first public disagreement between maintainers and a Platinum member.

Frequently asked questions

Where to start if your product depends on MCP

Do not buy a membership to fix a governance worry. Assign one engineer to the MCP working group closest to your integration, most likely Transports or the forming Agent Identity group. Have them read the open SEPs in that area this week. Influence over the spec is earned by people who show up with prototypes, and the rules say so plainly.

Then put the deprecation registry on your release calendar. The feature lifecycle policy tells you the earliest date anything you depend on can be removed. If your MCP server also exposes paid functions, read our analysis of MCP server pricing and agent tolls before the next spec change makes the decision for you. Security owners should pair it with the MCP server supply chain risk breakdown.

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