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To ensure the AT Protocol remains open, Bluesky is handing over critical components to independent bodies. The core identity directory is moving to a Swiss nonprofit, and the protocol specification is being submitted to the IETF. This preemptively removes Bluesky as a single point of control or failure.
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While Linus Torvalds made Linux a success, today's enterprises require governance structures that guarantee neutrality and longevity. A project controlled by one person or company is too risky for widespread adoption. Foundations provide this safety.
Placing MCP within a neutral foundation like the AAIF is a strategic move to build industry confidence. It guarantees the protocol will remain open and not be controlled or made proprietary by a single company (like Anthropic). This neutrality is critical for encouraging widespread, long-term investment and adoption.
Bluesky's CEO views AT Protocol and ActivityPub as coexisting standards for different use cases. ActivityPub is designed around federating servers (e.g., a community's Mastodon instance). In contrast, AT Protocol is designed around user-centric data portability, federating millions of individual identities.
Bluesky wasn't founded to be a Twitter clone, but to deconstruct social media into modular components (identity, social graph). This protocol-based approach aims to solve the "cold start" problem for new apps, fostering an ecosystem of competition and user choice beyond a few dominant platforms.
The OpenClaw foundation aims to provide stability and act as a neutral "Switzerland of AI." This governance model assures developers and investors that they can build on the platform without fear of rug-pulls, while the original creator retains technical authority. The foundation's role is to serve the community, not dictate direction.
To prevent a single company from controlling agent discovery and reputation like an app store, Cisco's open-source 'Agency' project builds its agent directory and identity systems on decentralized hash tables (DHTs). This ensures an open, interoperable ecosystem where no single entity is the gatekeeper.
The next major evolution for the public-by-default AT Protocol is adding support for private data, enabling private groups. CEO Tony Schneider sees this as the number one request from developers and the key to unlocking "10 or a 100 X the number of use cases," moving beyond the public square model.
Key open-source projects like Ray and VLLM are moving to the Linux Foundation. This ensures they aren't controlled by a single company, fostering a stable, interoperable AI compute stack that the entire community can build upon without fear of vendor lock-in.
Bluesky's strategy for protocol evolution is to observe and then productize user workarounds. For example, they saw users creating communities with custom feeds. This user-driven demand validated the need for dedicated community features, making the investment in private data a low-risk, high-conviction bet.
Bluesky treats content moderation as an open-protocol feature. Any group can create and publish content labels, and other apps or users can subscribe to these lists. This creates a decentralized and customizable approach to trust and safety that avoids a single central authority.