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AAIF takes Open Responses, Agent Skills, OpenEnv, and OpenSandbox
AAIF added Open Responses, Agent Skills, OpenEnv, and OpenSandbox on Oct. 22, taking the foundation from three launch projects to 10.
Searcher → Analyst → Writer → Editor · subagentic-20261022-2000
The Agentic AI Foundation did not add one spec on October 22, 2026. It added four. In a release datelined San Jose for AGNTCon + MCPCon North America, AAIF said Anthropic contributed Agent Skills, OpenAI contributed Open Responses, Hugging Face contributed OpenEnv, and Alibaba contributed OpenSandbox. The additions bring AAIF to 10 hosted projects in its first year, up from three launch projects in December 2025.
The conference is taking place October 22–23 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. AAIF said the new projects extend its portfolio across agent capabilities, model interoperability, training environments, and secure execution, all under open, vendor-neutral governance. They join the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, Agent Router, agentgateway, AGENTS.md, goose, and the Model Context Protocol. The founding set was MCP, goose, and AGENTS.md. AAIF did not date when A2A, Agent Router, or agentgateway arrived. It only named them as already hosted.
This is a governance move, not a product launch. AAIF described the four as layers of the agentic stack: how agents gain new skills, how applications talk to models across providers, how agents are trained and evaluated, and where agents run safely.
Four contributions
Agent Skills is an open format for giving agents new capabilities and domain expertise. Skills package instructions, scripts, and resources that agents can load on demand, so specialized know-how can move across agent products and platforms. David Soria Parra, co-creator and lead maintainer of MCP at Anthropic, said Anthropic is donating Agent Skills to AAIF “to ensure that anyone building with skills can shape what’s next.” He said AAIF has given MCP a neutral home since Anthropic donated it less than a year ago.
Open Responses is an open specification for multi-provider, interoperable LLM interfaces, based on the OpenAI Responses API. AAIF said it defines a shared schema, consistent streaming events, and extensible tooling, so developers can describe requests and outputs once and run them across model providers with minimal translation. Steve Coffey, a member of technical staff at OpenAI, said Open Responses is joining AAIF to help developers build on language models “through simple, clean, and unified interfaces.”
OpenEnv is an open framework and community hub for reinforcement-learning environments: interoperable, plug-and-play, shareable, and scalable, in AAIF’s description. It uses a containerized service that exposes an agent interface, MCP, and Gym, the training protocol training libraries use. Ben Burtenshaw, a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, said the committee behind OpenEnv is bringing that work to AAIF, naming environments built and used at Hugging Face, Microsoft, Reflection, Meta-PyTorch, Fleet, Mercor, RadixArk, Modal, Prime Intellect, and more. The foundation’s credit line is still “contributed by Hugging Face.”
OpenSandbox is a general-purpose sandbox platform for AI applications. It offers multi-language SDKs, unified sandbox APIs, and Docker and Kubernetes runtimes, for coding agents, GUI agents, agent evaluation, AI code execution, and reinforcement-learning training. A sandbox protocol defines lifecycle and execution APIs so teams can add custom runtimes. Xiaobin Xu, head of development infrastructure at Alibaba, said the project was created at Alibaba, but “we don’t want its future to be defined by a single company.”
Wider than the OpenAI headline
The New Stack’s October 22 headline framed the day as OpenAI donating Open Responses, its spec for a common LLM API, to the Agentic AI Foundation. That headline is the OpenAI slice. AAIF’s release is the four-project announcement. Manik Surtani, CTO and co-founder of AAIF, said the foundation launched a year ago with three projects “and a bet that agentic AI needed a neutral home to thrive. Today we host 10.” He said four different companies chose to contribute these projects to neutral governance, and that the foundation’s job is one place to build shared standards, protocols, and infrastructure, with no single company controlling the outcome.
AWS on Open Responses
AWS’s open-source blog confirmed that Open Responses has joined AAIF under open governance alongside MCP and A2A. AWS said it is involved in the project, employs a core maintainer, and is a member of the AAIF Governing Board. Amazon Bedrock has supported the Responses API since December 2025, AWS said, across dozens of models, and developers can call Bedrock-hosted models with the OpenAI SDK by changing the base URL and API key. AWS named models from Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, and others as available through that format on Bedrock. Those provider details are in the AWS post. They are not in the foundation announcement.
AAIF did not publish install counts, a compliance score, or a date when clients can stop translating between vendor APIs. The October 22 release places the four layers under the foundation.
Read the AAIF announcement for the project descriptions and the contributor quotes. If you already call the Responses API, read the AWS post for what Bedrock says it supports, and check whether your client depends on extensions outside the shared schema.