The Agentic AI Foundation, the neutral home where the agentic stack is being built, today announced that the Gates Foundation has joined as the first philanthropic organization, with Matt Vasey, senior advisor of AI strategy and ecosystems, taking a seat on the AAIF board. Announced in San Francisco, the collaboration will bring the needs of underserved communities into the open ecosystem shaping agentic AI across health, education, agriculture and economic opportunity.
The Gates Foundation has long worked to ensure advances in technology translate into meaningful progress for people around the world, particularly in underserved communities. Its membership in AAIF extends that work to the foundational layer of agentic AI, bringing perspectives from the communities it serves into an open, neutral forum, and actively contributing to the technical direction of AAIF's open projects and standards.
"AI has enormous potential to expand opportunity, but realizing that potential requires being deliberate about who has a voice in shaping the technology," said Mazin Gilbert, executive director of the Agentic AI Foundation. "Too often, the communities that stand to benefit the most from a new technology are far removed from the places where the underlying decisions are made. The Gates Foundation brings that perspective into AAIF and by connecting developers and communities around the world with the open projects building the foundations of agentic AI, we can widen the circle of people shaping what comes next."
As AI creates new possibilities across health, education, agriculture, and economic opportunity, the foundation is focused on helping ensure those benefits are broadly shared. AAIF provides a global ecosystem where members can directly shape emerging standards, collaborate on open source innovation, and help meet growing demand for interoperable, standardized agentic infrastructure.
Together, AAIF and the Gates Foundation will work to broaden participation in the open source communities building agentic AI, including by creating more opportunities for developers in regions that have historically been underrepresented in major technology ecosystems to participate and contribute.
That commitment will begin with MCP Dev Summit Nairobi, where the Gates Foundation has established a fund to support attendance innovators across the continent. The investment will help more developers access the region, connect with the broader community and participate directly in conversations around the open technologies shaping agentic AI. The Gates Foundation will serve as a Diamond Sponsor of the event, drawing on its network of partners and grantees to help ensure broad representation across African countries and communities.
"The standards being developed today will determine whether AI actually works for the billions of people the Gates Foundation aims to serve in underserved communities and low-income countries," said Matt Vasey, senior advisor at the Gates Foundation. "We're joining AAIF because getting this right requires building with equity from the start so this technology can truly transform lives and livelihoods everywhere."
The collaboration will help ensure LMIC needs are reflected at the foundational layer of the ecosystem, enabling transparent governance and broad industry participation to drive adoption of agentic AI infrastructure that evolves openly, predictably, and at production scale.
About the Agentic AI Foundation
The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) is the neutral home where the agentic stack is being built. With founding projects including MCP, A2A, AGENTS.md, goose, agentgateway, and Agent Router, AAIF governs the core standards and protocols that enable agents to operate interoperably across platforms. Through transparent governance and broad industry participation, AAIF is driving adoption and ensuring agentic AI infrastructure evolves openly, predictably, and at production scale.
