The superagent standards fight splits big software from the model labs
Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, and ServiceNow lining up behind a shared agent standard is a shot at the protocol Anthropic already won with. The systems of record want the rails back.
- Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, and ServiceNow have agreed to back a shared technical standard for connecting AI agents to business software, The Information reports, a move aimed at Anthropic's MCP and OpenAI.
- The groundwork is verifiable: the Agentic Resource Discovery standard announced in June is backed by the same enterprise names, with OpenAI and Anthropic notably absent.
- MCP's incumbency is the thing being contested: 10,000-plus active public servers and 97 million monthly SDK downloads reported by March 2026.
The enterprise software giants are organizing. The Information reports that Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, and ServiceNow have agreed to back a shared technical standard for connecting AI agents to business software, a move the outlet frames as aimed at Anthropic's Model Context Protocol and at OpenAI. The specifics remain single-sourced to The Information's paywalled reporting, but the direction matches groundwork that is fully checkable.
The paper trail runs through ARD
In mid-June, the Agentic Resource Discovery standard was announced with backing from Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce plus Cisco, Databricks, GitHub, NVIDIA, ServiceNow, and Snowflake, as Crypto Briefing detailed. ARD uses ai-catalog.json manifests so agents can query a registry and discover tools and other agents; it is Apache-licensed, Linux Foundation affiliated, and officially framed as complementing MCP rather than replacing it. The two most conspicuous absences from that backer list: OpenAI and Anthropic. Officially complementary, structurally competitive.
Incumbency versus the systems of record
What makes this a fight worth watching is that MCP already won round one. By March 2026 Anthropic reported more than 10,000 active public MCP servers and 97 million monthly SDK downloads, and the protocol now lives under the Linux Foundation, a maturation we tracked when Microsoft turned MCP into a certified distribution channel. But the companies lining up behind a shared alternative own the systems of record: Salesforce holds the customers, Snowflake the data, ServiceNow the workflows, and the two biggest clouds the compute. They are visibly uneasy building the agent era on a competitor's protocol foundation, the same instinct that produced the UN's parallel push on agent identity. Protocol politics is now enterprise software's main event, and the referee has not been chosen.