Going All In

I left my role at Block to become CTO of the Agentic AI Foundation. Here’s why.

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The short version

Over the past few months, I’ve been writing a series on the structural risks of AI - economic concentration, geopolitical weaponisation, the cautionary tale of social media, and the case for governed open infrastructure as the defence. Each post followed the argument one step further.

I walked away from a role I loved, at a company I deeply respect, working with people I’d built genuine trust with over many years (a quarter of my life, in fact). That wasn’t easy. But the argument kept arriving at the same place: the most important layer in AI - the protocols governing how AI agents communicate, coordinate, and act across systems, including the underlying infrastructure and tools - is being built right now. Whether that layer ends up open or captured will shape the next generation of technology, and the economy that runs on it. The window to get this right is finite. And it’s a layer I might know a little bit about.

Block - and my entire career - wouldn’t have been possible without the open infrastructure that others chose to build. Every system my coworkers and I built, every product we shipped, ran on foundations that existed because someone, years earlier, chose sharing over rent-seeking and control.

Open source has been part of my work from the start - I’ve contributed to and led projects in that space all my professional life. What’s new is the urgency. The agentic layer of AI is where those same principles need to land now.

In the last post, I asked engineers and companies building with AI to choose openness, and to demand it. This is me taking my own advice.

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What the work looks like

The Agentic AI Foundation, housed under the Linux Foundation, is the place for open, vendor-neutral standards infrastructure, and tooling for AI agents. As CTO, I’ll be helping shape the technical direction - working with member companies, growing the contributor community, fostering ideas, innovation, collaboration - and setting up the governance scaffolding that protects what matters: freedom of choice, transparency, broad access, and healthy, open competition.

It’s hands-on work. The kind that doesn’t show up in headlines and probably never will. When infrastructure does its job, you stop noticing it. Nobody thinks about the protocols that make email work, or the standards that let you switch cloud providers. How often do you think about Linux kernel maintainers? That’s the goal.

The space is moving fast, and what we’re building today will evolve. Priorities will shift, projects will change, the technical landscape will look different in a year. That comes with working at the frontier of a new layer. What stays the same is the mission: keeping this layer open, governed, and hard to capture.

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How to get involved

If you’re an engineer: contribute to open agentic infrastructure. Choose open protocols, open standards, and open implementations in what you build. In fact, demand them off your vendors. And give back to the commons. You’re following in the footsteps of the people who gave us Linux, open internet protocols and web standards, and much, much more.

If you’re a company building with AI: become a member. Participate in governance. Open standards mean the whole industry moves faster. Ideas circulate, trust is earned through transparency, and you compete on what you actually build, not on who captured the plumbing first.

If you want to follow along: I’ll be writing more. About what we’re building, what we’re learning, and where the hard parts are. Follow me here.

This isn’t the end of the conversation. It’s the beginning of the work. Come build with us.