Announcing the winners of the first AAIF Annual Technical Excellence Awards

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.

Outstanding Technical Contribution Award

This award recognizes people who made an exceptional, concrete technical contribution to an AAIF project. This year's recipients are Nate Barbettini and Marcelo Trylesinski.

Nate Barbettini is a founding engineer at Arcade.dev and a maintainer of the Model Context Protocol. He leads the Fine-Grained Authorization working group within the MCP project and has helped shape the protocol’s approach to OAuth and authorization for AI agents connecting to tools.

Marcelo Trylesinski helps maintain the MCP Python SDK, the official SDK for building MCP servers and clients in Python. His work carried the SDK through its version 2 release, keeping the Python developer experience for MCP fast and dependable as the project grew.

Community Builder Award

This award recognizes individuals or small teams who went out of their way to grow, educate, and energize the AAIF community. This year, the committee named two recipients: the organizers of MCP Meetup Tokyo, Satoshi Ito, Tomotada Sonoda, and Masaki Tsukada, and Lin Sun.

Satoshi Ito from Hitachi, Tomotada Sonoda from Leverages, and Masaki Tsukada from Mitsubishi Electric have organized and run MCP Meetup Tokyo, giving Japan's MCP community a regular place to share implementation work, security research, and enterprise deployment lessons in their own language and time zone.

Lin Sun is Head of Open Source at Solo.io and a maintainer of Istio, kgateway, and kagent. She sits on the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee and speaks and writes widely about agent connectivity and open standards, work that has introduced agentgateway and the broader AAIF project stack to audiences well beyond the foundation's existing members.

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.

The Keystone Award

This year, the foundation also introduced a new honor: the Keystone Award, AAIF's highest technical recognition. It goes to an individual whose work spans multiple parts of the foundation, combining technical contributions to AAIF projects with work that grew both the community and the foundation itself.

The first-ever recipient is Den Delimarsky, a lead maintainer of the Model Context Protocol at Anthropic. Den co-leads MCP's Security Interest Group, led the protocol's November 2025 specification release, and built a tracker that the project uses to follow activity across MCP's repositories. His work spans the technical and the communal in exactly the way the Keystone Award was created to recognize.

Thank you

Congratulations to this year’s recipients. I’m grateful for the expertise and commitment you bring to AAIF, and for the work you do to help others contribute.

We are still early in building this foundation. The next stage will depend on more people bringing their experience into our projects and working groups. If you’re building with agentic AI, I invite you to join the AAIF community and help shape this work.