From a FOSS developer? A Chinese competitor? A government trying to pick winners?
I don't think that this is the rationale for Block or the Linux Foundation; I roughly believe their narrative. But for the others? There's a little hint at the bottom of the article:
There’s also a more subtle consequence: Even with open governance, one company’s implementation could become the default simply because it ships fastest or gains the most usage.
So why is Anthropic donating MCP? Funnily, I still have my Claude Code setup which I play with sometimes and there isn't a single MCP server since 4.5 was released. It's not needed anymore: someone else's middleware will perform poorer against my prompts than the tools I let Claude develop for my prompting style. Someone bound to MCP is someone bound to lose in a race.
AGENTS.md from OpenAI is even more questionable; Anthropic has argued against using it that way recently because it often poisons context and I must agree with them on that. They've also introduced skills (which is counter to the single agent textfile) for their front-end software. Cursor/Cline/Roo have also had an improved concept for this since forever.
Also note these are poor standards and I've always suspected that they've been vibed and not designed by an experienced protocol/standards developer.
And then, the example straight after makes it so bad, it's funny:
Zemlin says that’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. He points to open source history — like Kubernetes “winning” the container race — as evidence that “dominance emerges from merit and not vendor control.”
Anyone that in 2024/2025 tried to provision a kubernetes cluster from scratch on sovereign compute knows that this is fully optimized for big centralized cloud providers now. It's a great example of something that's been captured.
AGENTS.mdfrom OpenAI is even more questionable; Anthropic has argued against using it that way recently because it often poisons context and I must agree with them on that. They've also introduced skills (which is counter to the single agent textfile) for their front-end software. Cursor/Cline/Roo have also had an improved concept for this since forever.