Experiments handing real businesses to agents are already running, while the standards that would let them plug in are being settled somewhere else.
IEEE Spectrum covered Andon Labs, which puts AI agents in charge of operating real businesses. In the same week, AGNTCon and MCPCon Japan 2026 were held in Tokyo, where a co-author of MCP from Anthropic gave a keynote on where the protocol goes next. Separately, Agent Router — which absorbs the API differences between vendors such as OpenAI and Anthropic — moved under the Linux Foundation with the aim of becoming an industry standard.
The order here is inverted. Handing business decisions to agents is already happening on bespoke integrations, before the connection layer has settled. MCP and Agent Router are the attempt to retrofit those bespoke integrations onto a common socket. Until that socket is fixed, neither the failures nor the successes of a delegated operation carry anywhere else. Note: how much of Andon Labs' operation runs without human intervention has not been disclosed.
Which vendor implementations Agent Router actually absorbs under Linux Foundation governance. When the next MCP focus areas named in the keynote turn into spec.