Cisco has donated its security-leaning Agntcy agentic AI project to the Linux Foundation.

The directory project was initially launched earlier this year through a collaboration between Cisco, Google Cloud, Oracle, Red Hat, and Dell Technologies. It's designed to be a de facto listing of AI agents, which are AI models that perform tasks autonomously, processing data and continuously adapting based on those results.

Agntcy seeks to define an interoperable AI ecosystem for all agents to exist in and "talk" to one another regardless of platform and function, reflecting enterprise needs to agentify workflows across multiple software systems.

Vijoy Pandey, GM and SVP of Cisco's Outshift, explained to SDxCentral in an interview that with numerous agents already deployed, “the world of eight billion people will feel more like 80 billion from a bandwidth perspective.”

“In order to build these collaborative systems, agents need to be able to find each other, verify their identities, and share context without expensive custom integration work,” Pandey commented, highlighting Agntcy’s capability of exchanging messages efficiently and securely at scale through secure low-latency interactive messaging.

In the OpenAI AutoGPT ecosystem alone there were more than seven million autonomous agent executions per month as of May. But as Dell’Oro Group researchers recently told SDxCentral, the most relevant apps to the networking space will come from IT vendors and not the ChatGPT provider.

Examples include Extreme Networks, which has released an agentic AI-focused network visualization offering, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) added agentic AI management capabilities to its GreenLake platform to provide root-cause analysis for network issues.

More recently, generative AI (genAI) Intel spinout Articul8 unveiled a Network Topology Agent capable of creating a queryable graph of entire networks.

Telecoms is also not immune to the concept, with Nokia releasing AI agents to help telecom operators manage their networks.

Broad support

Pandey explained that Cisco’s original stewardship reflected the company’s “focus on building secure infrastructure for the AI future," with safety pillars such as identity and access management reflected in an Agent Connect Protocol that defines how agents authenticate, establish trust, and exchange messages securely, making the directory a central gatekeeper for agentic traffic.

Hyperscaler support adds further authenticity to the scheme, but there remains the question of what attracted some of today’s biggest AI gatekeepers to the project and how their own agentic frameworks can exist alongside Agntcy’s.

Pandey said that donating Agntcy to the Linux Foundation “ensures this critical infrastructure remains neutral and accessible to everyone building multi-agent systems. This grants the project additional credibility across the industry, which is attractive to hyperscalers and enterprises alike.

"Building the foundational infrastructure for the internet of agents requires community ownership, not vendor control."

The donation comes as Gartner recently predicted more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canned within the next two years.

It also follows Google's gifting of its Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol to the Linux Foundation in June, aiming to establish industry-wide standards for AI agent interoperability.