AAIF adds "sandbox" phase to catch early-stage projects

The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) introduced a sandbox phase in its project lifecycle, announced at its AGNTCon Europe event in Amsterdam, to admit open source agentic AI projects that lack significant adoption, with a 12-month timer attached to the stage. Sandbox projects will receive no funding or marketing from the AAIF, which launched in late 2025 under the Linux Foundation and previously accepted projects only at its "growth" or "impact" levels requiring wide-scale production use. CTO Manik Surtani said the existing structure worked for flagship projects MCP, A2A, and the Goose AI agent but blocked newer entrants: "Agentic AI is not even two years old, we're still debating what an agentic stack even looks like, what that shape even is.

The Agentic AI Foundation AAIF has added a sandbox phase to its project lifecycle to welcome open source projects that do not yet have significant adoption, but it's added a 12-month timer to the initiative. The foundation, launched in late 2025 under the Linux Foundation umbrella, outlined the new project roadmap https://aaif.io/blog/aaif-sandbox-phase?ref=thestack.technology at its AGNTCon Europe event in Amsterdam, explaining sandbox projects would not receive funding or marketing from the AAIF. CTO Manik Surtani said: “Agentic AI is not even two years old, we’re still debating what an agentic stack even looks like, what that shape even is. So, of course, the most interesting projects are early, they’re not fully baked.” The AAIF has so far accepted projects at a “growth” or “impact” level, both requiring the project to be used in production at a wide scale and the latter requiring “wide-scale impact and substantial production deployments.” Surtani said the structure worked for the foundation’s flagship projects, including protocols MCP https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol?ref=thestack.technology , A2A https://github.com/a2aproject?ref=thestack.technology , and the open source Goose AI agent https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose?ref=thestack.technology , but it was a barrier to adding newer projects in the fast-moving agentic sector.