Mazin Gilbert, executive director of the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation, left Google earlier this year to lead the new AAIF, and he recently shared with The New Stack a truth central to its mission: The AAIF has to move faster than its members.

Gilbert, speaking in an interview at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America in San Jose last month, said on The New Stack podcast, “If this foundation does not move at the speed of light, it becomes irrelevant.”

He also talked about how he gets OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to agree on standards — even though they compete on products. Those companies are going to build products “with and without the standards,” he says.

All of this is happening while the foundation’s own members are often still figuring out how to build and use agents themselves. Some contribute to protocols and ship products, but others are still trying to get their agents out of the lab and into production. Gilbert says a third group of companies “frankly are panicking,” because they don’t have an agent strategy yet.

The San Jose event drew 4,300 registrants, he says, double the size of the foundation’s previous largest event in Amsterdam earlier this year.

Before our recording, Gilbert had just met with a group of maintainers from “very fiercely competing companies” who were working on the protocols together. All of those companies depend on these standards, he says, so they have a reason to get the work done.

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