OpenUK’s latest report calls for a sovereign foundation to hold publicly funded AI harnesses, infrastructure, and open standards, highlighting the loss of London-built innovations like the MCP to US bodies.
On 23 July, 2026, OpenUK, a UK-based non-profit advocacy group led by Amanda Brock, published an AI Openness report calling on the UK government to create a British national equivalent to the US-based Linux Foundation (LF). OpenUK first submitted this recommendation in a report titled “Making the UK the Home of Open Source” to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) earlier in the year.
The proposed National Foundation would hold code repositories, technical standards, and datasets generated through UK public funding to prevent intellectual property and governance from migrating overseas. The foundation would combine repository hosting, community engagement, technical standards, training, and event organisation into a single sovereign body, serving functions that would otherwise require separate Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) and dedicated sovereign funds.
OpenUK points to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), developed by two London-based engineers, as a primary example of UK-origin open-source innovation lost to US governance. Anthropic backed MCP and subsequently donated it to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation (alongside Block’s goose and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md). According to MCP co-creator David Soria Parra, the protocol was transferred to the Linux Foundation because creators lacked a UK-based, vendor-neutral, trademark-safe governance entity.
OpenUK highlights that while the UK ranks as Europe’s top nation in open-source software and AI openness, it lacks dedicated state-backed foundations comparable to Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund (now a formal government agency), China’s Open Atom Foundation, and the European Union’s broad initiatives aimed at digital autonomy across cloud, AI, cybersecurity, and open hardware.
