AI engineering company Solvd has officially joined the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) as a Silver Member, the Linux Foundation announced May 18 at its Open Source Summit in Minneapolis.
Solvd is one of 43 organizations added to AAIF in the past quarter, bringing total membership to 190 – a figure that reflects how quickly the standards question around agentic AI has moved from theoretical to urgent.
AAIF was launched in December 2025 with founding members including Anthropic, AWS, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, under the Linux Foundation’s neutral governance model. Its mandate is to develop the open, interoperable standards that will govern how AI agents connect to enterprise systems, authenticate across platforms, and operate reliably in production.
The centerpiece of that work is Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), the emerging standard for how AI agents connect to external tools and data sources, alongside OpenAI’s AGENTS.md, which gives agents project-specific context across repositories and codebases.
As a member, Solvd’s engineering leaders will contribute to AAIF working groups focused on MCP implementation, AGENTS.md, and open-source agent tooling. The company will also participate in two flagship AAIF events: the MCP Dev Summit Europe in Amsterdam on September 17–18 and AGNTCon + MCPCon in San Jose on October 22–23.
Why the standards question matters for Washington
For the DC policy community, AAIF’s growth trajectory is worth tracking closely. The organizations now joining the foundation – spanning financial services, government, academia, and enterprise technology – are doing so because the protocols being developed inside it will directly shape how agentic AI systems are deployed, governed, and regulated across sectors that Washington cares deeply about.
As OpenAI stated at AAIF’s formation, without common conventions and neutral governance, agent development risks fragmenting into incompatible silos that limit portability, safety, and progress.
That fragmentation isn’t an abstract risk. It is the default outcome when a fast-moving technology develops without coordinated infrastructure standards, and the regulatory and security costs of unwinding it compound over time.
The numbers reinforce the urgency. Gartner forecasts that agentic AI could drive approximately 30% of enterprise application software revenue by 2035, surpassing $450 billion USD; MCP has crossed 110 million monthly downloads since its November 2024 launch; AGENTS.md has been adopted by more than 60,000 open-source projects in under a year.
And with only 21% of companies currently holding mature AI governance frameworks, and the EU AI Act’s August 2026 compliance deadline adding regulatory pressure, enterprises in regulated industries are increasingly looking to neutral standards bodies like AAIF for the governance architecture that makes compliant deployment possible.
What Solvd brings
Solvd’s value to AAIF working groups rests on a combination that standards processes benefit most from: deep research credentials alongside direct production experience at enterprise scale.
The company’s 700+ engineers serve more than 100 enterprise clients across fintech, banking, technology, e-commerce, and hospitality, giving it ongoing, real-world visibility into where agentic deployments succeed and where they fail. That operational depth is complemented by over 100 published papers, more than 15 PhDs on staff, contributions at NeurIPS, ICML, and CVPR, and a NeurIPS 2025 Best Paper Award winner.
“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.
CTO Skylar Roebuck, however, framed it in terms of historical precedent. “The technologies we use every day were all made possible by open, shared protocols – TCP/IP, HTTP, REST. AI is the next technology revolution, and the standards we set now will define what’s possible for years to come.”
Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, has described MCP and AGENTS.md as having become “essential tools for developers building this new class of agentic technologies”, adding that AAIF ensures they “can grow with the transparency and stability that only open governance provides.”
With 190 member organizations and counting, the foundation is fast becoming the institutional home where the governance architecture of enterprise AI gets built – and who is in the room during that process will matter for years to come.
Featured image: Via Agentic AI Foundation
Disclosure: This article mentions clients of an Espacio portfolio company.