The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), part of the Linux Foundation, announced four new projects on October 22, 2026: "Agent Skills, contributed by Anthropic; Open Responses, contributed by OpenAI; OpenEnv, contributed by Hugging Face; and OpenSandbox, contributed by Alibaba." The additions bring AAIF to 10 hosted projects, up from three at its launch in December 2025. AAIF says the four cover "how agents gain new skills, how applications talk to models across providers, how agents are trained and evaluated, and where agents run safely." InfoQ reported the additions from AGNTCon + MCPCon North America in San Jose.

#What changed?

The four join "the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, Agent Router, agentgateway, AGENTS.md, goose, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP)" under what AAIF calls "AAIF’s open, vendor-neutral governance." AAIF was co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI in December 2025 and operates as a directed fund under the Linux Foundation.

Project

Contributed by

What AAIF says it does

License (per repo)

Agent Skills

Anthropic

Gives agents new capabilities and domain expertise

Apache 2.0 code, CC BY 4.0 docs

Open Responses

OpenAI

Multi-provider LLM interface spec

Apache-2.0 code, CC-BY-4.0 spec and docs

OpenEnv

Hugging Face

Framework and hub for RL environments

BSD-3-Clause

OpenSandbox

Alibaba

Sandbox platform for AI applications

Apache 2.0

Only Anthropic published its own post about the donation. OpenAI, Hugging Face and Alibaba spoke through quotes in the foundation's announcement.

#Agent Skills (Anthropic)

"Today, we’re donating Agent Skills, the open standard that gives AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)," Anthropic wrote. Anthropic explains: "A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent a specific task or domain, along with any scripts or reference material it needs." Per the repository, full instructions load only when a task calls for them.

Anthropic says: "We are donating the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain." It adds: "You can continue to use the standard or contribute to it without joining the AAIF."

Anthropic's numbers, all its own claims:

  • "More than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, have integrated Agent Skills since we published the standard in December 2025."
  • "So far, 1 million skills have been published and nearly 280 million installed."
  • Anthropic's own AAIF proposal counted "46 agent products" on the project's public Client Showcase as of September 21, 2026, a different measure.

"Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other companies will maintain the standard as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as Lead Maintainers," Anthropic says. Anthropic has "proposed starting with a roadmap covering versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for people who write and install skills."

David Soria Parra, co-creator of MCP and a lead maintainer of Agent Skills, said in the foundation's announcement: "Without the right context, even the most intelligent agents fall short."

#Open Responses (OpenAI)

AAIF describes it as "an open specification for building multi-provider, interoperable LLM interfaces, based on the OpenAI Responses API." It "defines a shared schema, consistent streaming events and extensible tooling, so developers can describe requests and outputs once and run them across model providers with minimal translation." OpenAI first announced Open Responses on January 15, 2026, in its API changelog.

Steve Coffey, Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI, said in the foundation's announcement: "Open Responses is thrilled to be joining the AAIF to further our mission of helping developers build great products on today's language models through simple, clean, and unified interfaces." OpenAI's proposal says: "Governance seats belong to individuals; a single vendor may not hold a majority of core-maintainer seats."

InfoQ notes, citing The New Stack, "that Anthropic still defines its own Messages API and Google its Interactions API."

#OpenEnv (Hugging Face)

AAIF calls OpenEnv "an open framework and community hub for creating RL environments that makes them interoperable, plug-and-play, easy to build, easy to share, and scalable." Hugging Face's proposal says it "launched in October 2025 as a joint project between Hugging Face and Meta (Meta-PyTorch)" and moved to huggingface/OpenEnv in June 2026. Per its repository, each environment is a Docker image that can run locally, on a cloud sandbox or as a Hugging Face Space.

Ben Burtenshaw, Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face, said in the foundation's announcement: "Reinforcement Learning environments are a fundamental part of that stack because they teach agents the capabilities they will use in the real world."

#OpenSandbox (Alibaba)

AAIF calls OpenSandbox "a general-purpose sandbox platform for AI applications" that "offers multi-language SDKs, unified sandbox APIs and Docker and Kubernetes runtimes for use cases including coding agents, GUI agents, agent evaluation, AI code execution and reinforcement learning training." Its repository has moved to opensandbox-group/OpenSandbox, which describes itself as "An Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) Project".

Xiaobin Xu, Head of Development Infrastructure at Alibaba, said in the foundation's announcement: "While OpenSandbox was created at Alibaba, we don't want its future to be defined by a single company."

#What changes for developers?

  • Agent Skills users have nothing to migrate. Anthropic says to "Read the specification at agentskills.io and join the discussion on GitHub."
  • Open Responses lets developers write one request format for any endpoint that implements it, per AAIF's description.
  • OpenEnv and OpenSandbox are projects you run yourself; OpenSandbox's repository says to "Start locally with Docker and deploy on Kubernetes through a unified sandbox API."

The projects passed AAIF's Technical Committee review, according to the foundation's public proposal tracker.

Our analysis: MCP, AGENTS.md and Agent Skills, formats that agents from several vendors use, sit under one foundation. By their own proposals, though, Agent Skills is still led by Anthropic and OpenSandbox by an Alibaba-led team, so how far governance widens will depend on onboarding.

#Who is behind AAIF?

"A year ago, AAIF launched with three projects and a bet that agentic AI needed a neutral home to thrive. Today we host 10," said Manik Surtani, CTO and co-founder of the foundation. A companion release says "AAIF has reached 305 members in under a year since its launch in December 2025" and that "60 new member organizations have joined this quarter".

#How does it compare?

MCP, which Anthropic donated to AAIF, is the foundation's best-known project; see our coverage of the MCP reference servers v2. OpenAI's plugins for ChatGPT and Codex can contain SKILL.md skills, as we covered in what Dots mean for developers. For running agents more safely, see our guide to controlling an AI coding agent's network access on a Mac.

#What is still unclear?

  • Formal transfer. Anthropic did not give a date for handing over the Agent Skills name, domain and GitHub organization.
  • Agent Skills steering committee. Anthropic's proposal says its makeup "will be settled with the Linux Foundation during onboarding."
  • Open Responses adoption. Anthropic has not said whether it will implement Open Responses.
  • Roadmaps. No timetable is given for the Agent Skills roadmap or OpenEnv's priorities.