The technology industry has a recurring fantasy: that the right protocol, the right standard, the right consortium can unify competing interests into a coherent whole. In December 2025, that fantasy received its most ambitious iteration yet when the Linux Foundation announced the Agentic AI Foundation, bringing together Anthropic, OpenAI, Block, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services under a single banner. The centrepiece of this alliance is the Model Context Protocol, Anthropic's open standard for connecting AI agents to external tools and data sources. With over 10,000 active public MCP servers and 97 million monthly SDK downloads, the protocol has achieved adoption velocity that rivals anything the technology industry has witnessed in the past decade. Yet beneath the press releases lies a more complicated reality. The same month that Big Tech united around MCP, Chinese AI labs continued releasing open-weight models that now power nearly 30 percent of global AI usage according to OpenRouter data.…