CAMARA Charts a Path for Network-Aware AI Applications with MCP

New white paper outlines how CAMARA network APIs and MCP can work together to connect AI systems with real-time network intelligence

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The Linux Foundation's CAMARA project, an open source community addressing telco industry API interoperability, today announced the release of a new white paper, "In Concert: Bridging AI Systems & Network Infrastructure through MCP: How to Build Network-Aware Intelligent Applications." The paper describes how AI applications and agents can integrate with telecom network infrastructure by exposing CAMARA network capabilities to AI systems through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling AI to consume real-time, policy-compliant network context to improve digital experiences and application outcomes.

CAMARA exists to help developers "write once" against operator-agnostic network APIs, reducing fragmentation and enabling consistent access to network capabilities such as Quality on Demand (QoD), Device Location, Edge Discovery, and anti-fraud signals. The new paper outlines how an MCP server can act as a translator, turning CAMARA APIs into MCP "tools" that AI applications can discover and call, which bridges the historical isolation between AI systems and the networks that power modern digital services. By adopting MCP, AI agents gain immediate access to the latest API capabilities as they are released, eliminating the bottleneck of continuous code refactoring. This seamless integration ensures that users always experience the full potential of the technology the moment it becomes available

"AI agents increasingly shape the digital experiences people rely on every day, yet they operate disconnected from network capabilities - intelligence, control, and real-time source of truth," said Herbert Damker, CAMARA TSC Chair and Lead Architect, Infrastructure Cloud at Deutsche Telekom. "CAMARA and MCP bring AI and network infrastructure into concert, securely and consistently across operators."

The paper includes practical example scenarios for "network-aware" intelligent applications/agents, including:

• Intelligent video streaming with AI-powered quality optimization
• Banking fraud prevention using network-verified security context
• Local/edge-optimized AI deployment informed by network and edge resource conditions

In addition to the architecture and use cases, the paper outlines CAMARA's objectives for supporting MCP, which include covering areas such as security guidelines; standardized MCP tooling for CAMARA APIs; and quality requirements and success factors needed for production-grade implementations. The white paper is available for download on the CAMARA website.

Collaboration with the Agentic AI Foundation

The release of this work aligns with a major ecosystem milestone: MCP now lives under the Linux Foundation's newly formed Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a sister initiative that provides neutral, open governance for key agentic AI building blocks. The Linux Foundation announced AAIF on December 9, 2025, with founding project contributions including Anthropic's MCP, Block's goose, and OpenAI's AGENTS.md. AAIF's launch emphasizes MCP's role as a broadly adopted standard for connecting AI models to tools, data, and applications, with more than 10,000 published MCP servers cited by the Linux Foundation and Anthropic.

"With MCP now under the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, developers can invest with confidence in an open, vendor-neutral standard," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation. "CAMARA's work demonstrates how MCP can unlock powerful new classes of network-aware AI applications."

"The Agentic AI Foundation calls for trustworthy infrastructure. CAMARA answers that call. As AI shifts from conversation to orchestration, agentic workflows demand synchronization with reality," said Nick Venezia, CEO and Founder, Centillion.AI, CAMARA End User Council Representative to the TSC. "We provide the contextual lens that allows AI to verify rather than infer, moving from guessing to knowing."

The white paper is available to read online and download as a PDF on the CAMARA website.

Join the CAMARA Ecosystem

CAMARA offers new opportunities for collaboration between network operators, marketplaces, aggregators and API customers. CAMARA is pleased to be selected as the Network API definition location for Aduna amongst leading global telecoms. A critical success factor is also the established alignment with GSMA Open Gateway and TMForum about forming an open, global, accessible API ecosystem. The benefit for customers and developers comes in the form of consistent and user-friendly access to network capabilities, thus enabling developers to seamlessly deploy applications to run consistently across telco networks and countries. This prevents fragmentation and empowers faster, more versatile advancement of global application portability and broad industry adoption of new features and capabilities.

In addition to its broad portfolio of participating organizations, the CAMARA fund is composed of 10 Premium sponsors (including Accenture, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Nokia, Orange, Telefonica, Verizon, Vodafone, T-Mobile), 8 General sponsors (including AlphaZero, CableLabs, Centillion.AI, Charter Communications, INDY Kite, INVIA, Scenera, Sent Inc. Shabodi), and five Associate sponsors (Berkeley University of California, OMA Specworks, OpenID Foundation, UFRN, University of Colorado Boulder).

To learn more about all CAMARA's growing list of APIs, please visit https://camaraproject.org/api-overview/.

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world's infrastructure, including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, ONAP, OpenChain, OpenSSF, PyTorch, RISC-V, SPDX, Zephyr, and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org

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Media Contact
Jill Lovato
The Linux Foundation
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SOURCE CAMARA Project