“These protocols are the air you breathe. These protocols are the plumbing. They may not be that sexy, maybe, but if we don't get those right, that entire agentic AI space will be a mess, expensive, and prohibitive basically for any company to deploy this at scale.”
The New Stack Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Context
The host pointed out that fierce competitors are each donating projects to the same open-standards foundation for AI agents. Gilbert says they sit at the same table because shared standards are basic infrastructure, and without them every company builds costly custom integrations.
Transcript
…So it's that diversity of players, diversity of companies. Agent router comes from Titrate, which is not a large company. And so we're starting to see even smaller, medium-sized companies participate in actually contributing projects and working groups. And we're going to see a lot more than that.
Yeah, you've got fierce competitors like Open Standards Anthropic both donating projects today.
We are. And I think that's the beautiful thing about this foundation, the neutral governance that we have. Open Standards Anthropic are fierce competitors, but they're both on the board. So is Google, so is Microsoft, so is Amazon. Like all of these are competitors. We have Bloomberg, we have Shopify, we have Block. The beautiful thing is this is the ground where these folks come together to collaborate. I'm just shocked, astonished. I've sat on so many meetings today. I was in the maintainer meeting just a few minutes ago. And these very fiercely competing companies are all sitting on the same table talking about how they're helping each other in advancing the protocol. These protocols is the air you breathe. These protocols are the plumbing. They may not be that sexy, maybe, but if we don't get those right, that entire Agentic AI space will be a mess, expensive, and prohibitive basically for any company to deploy this at scale.
Yeah, fragmented in a way that we've seen with other technologies. That's exactly hard to keep up over time. What is it like for you adding all of these companies now as members? Like, what's it like? We talk a lot about scaling and technology, but scaling one of these foundations.
So I mentioned that we're the fastest growing foundation in the history of Linux Foundation. None of us have done this before. So I just want to be very clear about that. We are learning this as we go. Okay. And it's an incredible learning experience. I'm certainly at the job. I'm learning finance…
Yeah, yeah. How can you move faster than Google? How can you move faster than OpenAI or Anthropic? That's a tall task.