AGNTCY agentic AI infrastructure is moving to the Linux Foundation — and that matters a lot more than it might sound.
Originally developed under Cisco’s Outshift division, AGNTCY was designed to solve one of the least sexy but most foundational problems in AI right now: making agents work together, across clouds, across vendors, across real-world use cases. That makes its donation to the Linux Foundation not just a governance story, but a directional shift for where enterprise AI might actually be headed.
At its core, AGNTCY is trying to be the DNS, identity layer, and messaging protocol for autonomous AI agents. While the spotlight in AI has recently been fixated on the model layer (LLMs, fine-tunes, GPUs), real business impact often lives downstream — in the workflows and agentic chains enterprises are stitching together from an increasingly fragmented landscape of APIs, tools, and vendor-specific AI wrappers.
Vijoy Pandey, SVP of Outshift by Cisco and one of the public voices behind AGNTCY, explained in his LinkedIn post that this move is about building an open, interoperable “Internet of Agents” — one where discovery, trust, and communication are no longer hard-coded integrations.
“The missing piece isn’t smarter agents,” he wrote. “It’s infrastructure that lets any agent work with any other agent, no matter who built it or where it runs.”
That infrastructure now lives under the Linux Foundation, with Cisco, Google Cloud, Dell Technologies, Oracle, and Red Hat backing it as formative members. And unlike many open-source handovers that turn into zombie projects, AGNTCY is already shipping real specs and code: agent discovery protocols, verifiable identities, SLIM (Secure Low-latency Interactive Messaging), and observability frameworks tuned for probabilistic, multi-agent chains.
If that sounds like plumbing, it is. But as with TCP/IP or Kubernetes before it, agentic AI won’t scale without that plumbing.
And there’s a reason this announcement is happening now. Since AGNTCY launched in March alongside Galileo and LangChain, the fragmentation problem has only accelerated. Everyone wants to own the agent stack. But without common protocols, the whole agent wave risks devolving into silos, just like the early internet almost did.
This is where the Linux Foundation matters. Projects like Kubernetes and PyTorch became foundational only after moving to neutral, community-first governance. That’s what AGNTCY is betting on too.
From a global perspective, this shift toward open agentic systems mirrors a broader AI decentralisation movement. In South Africa, for example, Google’s AI in Action 2025 campaign underscores how meaningful AI deployments depend not on single models but on interoperable, practical systems that can talk to one another. AGNTCY essentially proposes the scaffolding to make those connections native, secure, and scalable.
The Linux Foundation’s Executive Director Jim Zemlin called AGNTCY “groundwork for secure, interoperable collaboration among autonomous agents.” But more importantly, it signals that major players are willing to back open agentic AI infrastructure — instead of trying to win the stack solo.
With AGNTCY, the boring parts of AI might finally start getting interesting.