One of the privileges of leading AAIF is getting to know the people behind the work. The nominations for these awards gave us a chance to hear from their peers about the contributions they value and the people they wanted us to recognize.
Today, at AGNTCon and MCPCon North America in San Jose, I’m proud to announce the winners of the first AAIF Annual Technical Excellence Awards.
We opened nominations in June. A volunteer Selection Committee drawn from the AAIF Governing Board and Technical Advisory Council, with participation from the wider community, reviewed nominations across three award categories. We are also proud to introduce the Keystone Award, our highest technical recognition, presented directly by the foundation.
Thank you to the committee for the care they brought to this process, and to everyone who nominated a colleague or team. It’s a pleasure to introduce this year’s winners.
See the full list of the first annual technical excellence award recipients here.
[Excerpt from AAIF post on winners for the Open Agentic AI Innovation Award]
This award recognizes organizations that deployed or advanced AAIF's open standards in production, research, or public tooling with real-world impact. This year's recipients are AURA from Mezmo, Opaque Systems, and Vstorm.
AURA is Mezmo's open source agent harness for production site reliability work. It connects to MCP servers so operators can hand AI agents a scoped set of tools instead of exposing every available tool to every agent, which keeps production systems safer to operate with AI in the loop.
Opaque Systems built AgenTrust, an open source tool for proving what an AI agent actually did in production. In its first three months, AgenTrust recorded close to half a million package downloads, with teams continuing to build integrations on top of it.
Vstorm is an agentic AI engineering company. In December 2025, Vstorm became the first agentic AI engineering and services company to join the Agentic AI Foundation, and it is an active contributor to the Foundation. Vstorm put AGENTS.md into every project it ships and built MCP support directly into its own open source framework, so the same project knowledge that guides a coding agent during development also guides agents once they're running in production.
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