South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT said on Monday that the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) has joined the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) to move to lead international standards for agentic AI.

AAIF is an organisation set up under the Linux Foundation in December last year to develop and spread common specifications so agentic AI technology can develop in an open environment without being dependent on a specific company.

Participants include global AI companies such as Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral AI, as well as Stanford University and South Korean firms NHN KCP, Danal, Nexthreat and Rableup. As of this month, about 250 organisations are members, eight months after its launch.

Agentic AI goes beyond existing generative AI that answers user questions or creates content. It is a technology in which AI sets plans on its own and links to external programs and services to carry out actual work.

As this happens, the importance of interoperability specifications that allow different AIs and external services to exchange information is growing. One example is the Model Context Protocol (MCP) developed by Anthropic, which is a common connection rule used when AI connects to external programs or data to carry out tasks.

AAIF runs major open-source projects used in the agentic AI ecosystem, including MCP, Google A2A and OpenAI's AGENTS.md.

ETRI plans to work with seven technical working groups run by AAIF and participate in developing key standards for agentic AI, including interoperability, reliability, security and governance. It also plans to reflect domestic research results in international standards and expand joint research opportunities with global companies and research institutes.

Park Tae-wan (박태완), director general for ICT Industry Policy at the ministry, said, "Agentic AI, along with physical AI, is a core technology for leading the reasoning AI market, which is expected to grow rapidly in recent years." He added, "We hope ETRI's AAIF membership will become a foundation for excellent R&D results from industry, academia and research institutes in South Korea to lead the agentic AI market."