OpenAI donates Open Responses, its spec for a common LLM API, to the Agentic AI Foundation
The New Stack Frederic Lardinois ● Covered by 4 sources
OpenAI handed its Open Responses API spec to the Agentic AI Foundation. It’s another push to make model APIs less of a vendor maze.
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Frederic Lardinois — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI said Thursday it is donating Open Responses, its API specification for common LLM calls, to the Agentic AI Foundation. That means the project is moving into a vendor-neutral home under the Linux Foundation, alongside other agent-focused efforts such as MCP, A2A, AGENTS.md, goose, agentgateway, and Agent Router.
The pitch behind Open Responses is simple enough. Developers get a shared set of core API calls that should work across model providers, instead of rebuilding their app every time a vendor wraps the same basic building blocks in a different format. Messages, tool calls, function calling: everyone has them, but everyone names and shapes them differently. Open Responses is meant to standardize those primitives so the translation layer stops being the developer’s problem.
OpenAI said Vercel AI Gateway and Databricks Model Serving already implement the spec. The company also said the AAIF will give developers and providers a neutral place to keep working on it together. That matters because foundations have become the preferred parking spot for infrastructure that’s supposed to outlive any one company’s product strategy.
The foundation itself is still young. It launched in December 2025 with MCP, goose, and AGENTS.md as its first projects, and its technical steering committee will initially be made up of project maintainers. Open Responses is not arriving in a vacuum, either: OpenAI’s own contributor guide says its core schema files were copied from OpenAI’s API, and the spec already has broad support from AWS in Bedrock, Databricks, LM Studio, Ollama, Hugging Face, Nvidia, OpenRouter, Red Hat, Vercel, and open source projects like vLLM and OGC.
Not everyone is on board, though. Anthropic is missing from the support list, even though it is a member of the AAIF and has its own Messages API. Google also has its own default with the Interactions API. That split is exactly what a neutral spec is trying to clean up, and the fact that OpenAI is now handing the project to a foundation says the company knows the problem is bigger than any one API.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right move, and also a very familiar one: the industry keeps rebuilding the same plumbing, then acts relieved when a foundation agrees to hold the wrench. Open standards are the only sane answer here, because nobody needs three rival ways to describe a tool call and a parade of “compatible” wrappers around them. The real test is whether the biggest holdouts decide portability matters more than branding.
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