Why Block gave Goose to the Agentic AI Foundation

What began as an internal developer tool at Block has evolved into a broader open-source initiative with industry backing. Goose, Block’s AI coding agent, followed a path similar to Amazon’s transformation of internal infrastructure into Amazon Web Services. After deploying Goose companywide, Block open-sourced the tool under a permissive license, leading to rapid adoption across the developer community. But according to Manik Surtani, early momentum exposed governance challenges. Although Goose was technically open source, Block retained trademark ownership, creating concerns for enterprises seeking truly independent governance. To address this, the team partnered with the creators of Anthropic and the Model Context Protocol community to establish the Agentic AI Foundation under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation. Goose, MCP, and Agents.MD became the foundation’s initial projects, chosen largely to accelerate the launch of the new organization and create a collaborative ecosystem around agentic AI development. Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in open-source AI projects: Anthropic extends MCP with a UI framework https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-extends-mcp-with-an-app-framework/ Why the Linux Foundation adopted MCP, with Jim Zemlin and Mazin Gilbert https://thenewstack.io/agentic-ai-foundation-launch/ Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. https://thenewstack.io/newsletter