CData Joins the Agentic AI Foundation

CData has joined the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) as a Silver member, contributing to the development of the protocol through our experience building to MCP and making our customers successful. AAIF is the Linux Foundation project formed in December 2025, when Anthropic donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the foundation alongside Block’s goose and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md, with backing from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare. Bringing MCP under neutral, vendor-agnostic governance was the point: a protocol this widely adopted, now spanning Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Cursor, and VS Code, needed a home where no single company could set its direction.

“We built Connect AI as an MCP-native data layer, so how this protocol evolves matters directly to us. Joining AAIF is how we make sure the standards being set reflect what enterprise customers need to maintain AI connections to their real systems and fulfill the promise of AI,”

— Raviv Levi, Chief Product & Technology Officer at CData.

AAIF organizes its standards work into focused working groups, each chaired by people from companies already running agentic systems at scale. We’re following four in particular:

• Identity & Trust, which is defining portable identity and delegation protocols for agents

• Observability & Traceability, covering execution tracing and audit standards

• Security & Privacy, working toward security-by-design benchmarks for agentic systems

• Workflows & Process Integration, focused on agents moving from isolated tasks to multi-step business processes

Each is grappling with a question that becomes more pressing as agents move from prototypes into production and we are looking forward to contributing our learnings from tens of thousands of CData customers.

Who else is at the table

AAIF’s membership has grown to more than 170 organizations as of June 2026. The roster spans the largest model providers and cloud platforms alongside hundreds of smaller infrastructure, security, and tooling companies, which is itself a signal of where MCP governance now sits: not as one vendor’s protocol, but as shared infrastructure the whole ecosystem has a stake in maintaining. Joining as a Silver member puts CData inside that same governance structure, with the ability to participate in working groups and nominate representatives to AAIF committees. This enables us to raise the suggestions, concerns, and real-world feedback of our Connect AI users to help shape the future of MCP.

We’re looking forward to contributing to AAIF’s work and learning from a community that includes some of the most active builders in agentic AI. Learn more about the Agentic AI Foundation and CData Connect AI.