Google, Microsoft, Salesforce back rival AI agent standard to challenge Anthropic's MCP

What happened

According to an exclusive report by The Information on July 13, 2026, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, and ServiceNow agreed to back a shared protocol for connecting AI agents to business software. The coalition targets Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), which has accumulated 97 million installs over the past 18 months.

Context and impact

The companies in the new alliance control the software where most of the world's enterprise data lives: Salesforce (CRM), Snowflake (data), ServiceNow (workflows), plus the two largest clouds. If they establish their own standard, every company deploying AI agents gets an alternative to a competitor's infrastructure. Ironically, all participating companies including Anthropic and OpenAI are also in the Linux Foundation Agentic AI Foundation.

Details

• Alliance: Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, ServiceNow
• Target: rival Anthropic MCP (97M installs, de facto standard)
• Technical basis: Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol — complementary, not a replacement for MCP
• MCP handles agent tools, A2A handles inter-agent communication
• Linux Foundation Agentic AI Foundation: all players including rivals are members
• Motivation: giants don't want to build agentic infrastructure on a competitor's platform