Today, I am thrilled to announce a significant milestone for the PyTorch Foundation: we are expanding our scope to become an umbrella foundation, allowing us to host additional projects. This expansion positions the PyTorch Foundation to foster a broader ecosystem of high-value, trusted, and innovative AI projects that cater to all stages of the AI lifecycle—from training and inference to industry-specific applications.
Why Expand?
Since its inception at the Linux Foundation two and a half years ago, the PyTorch Foundation has rapidly grown, now encompassing over 30 member organizations and 120 vibrant ecosystem projects. PyTorch itself has become the framework of choice for AI researchers, practitioners, and industry leaders worldwide. Our flagship PyTorch Conference has seen attendance multiply sixfold over just two years, reflecting the community’s tremendous enthusiasm and engagement.
With new initiatives such as PyTorch Day events, global community meetups, the PyTorch Ambassador Program, Open Source Program Office (OSPO) outreach, the Speaker’s Bureau, and our upcoming training and certification programs, we have significantly deepened our community’s expertise and collaboration capabilities. To sustain and accelerate this momentum, the logical next step was to expand the PyTorch Foundation into an umbrella organization.
What Does an Umbrella Foundation Mean?
By transitioning into an umbrella foundation, PyTorch will now host a range of diverse, high-quality AI and ML projects beyond PyTorch Core. These include foundation-hosted projects in two categories:
- Platform Projects: Domain-agnostic solutions essential across various stages of the AI lifecycle, such as training, inference, model optimization, and deployment as well as agentic systems.
- Vertical Projects: Domain-specific projects tailored to particular industries or applications, such as biomedical imaging, protein folding, and geospatial analysis.
Projects under our umbrella gain immediate access to vendor-neutral governance, enhanced visibility, increased funding opportunities, and robust community engagement and support.
Foundation-Hosted vs. Ecosystem Projects
As we expand, it’s important to clarify the distinction between foundation-hosted and ecosystem projects:
- Foundation-Hosted Projects are projects that fall under the umbrella, they are officially governed and administered under the PyTorch Foundation’s neutral and transparent governance model. Project maintainers continue to oversee their project, and they transfer assets to the Linux Foundation for independent stewardship and adopt an open governance model significantly reducing vendor bias and encouraging broader community contributions and adoption. These projects have greater stability and longevity and integrate with the larger PyTorch community.
- Ecosystem Projects remain independently managed but receive recognition and increased visibility by aligning themselves closely with the PyTorch Foundation community standards. These projects meet specific quality and maturity criteria but retain full independence in governance and asset management.
How to Join the PyTorch Ecosystem or Become a Foundation-Hosted Project
We have clearly defined pathways for projects looking to become part of the PyTorch community:
- Ecosystem Project Status: Projects must meet defined criteria, such as active development, comprehensive documentation, CI/CD infrastructure, clear governance, and community engagement. Approved ecosystem projects benefit from increased exposure and official recognition on the PyTorch Landscape.
- Candidate Project Status: Ecosystem projects aspiring to foundation-hosted status can become candidates by securing sponsorship from a PyTorch Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) voting member. Candidates receive guidance on meeting all necessary governance, technical, and strategic criteria.
- Foundation-Hosted Project Status: Candidate projects demonstrating high maturity, stability, multi-platform support, security best practices, and strategic value to the PyTorch community can be approved by the TAC. These projects gain extensive benefits, including neutral trademark hosting, foundation support, marketing and events resources, governance guidance, and strategic funding opportunities.
Ensuring Long-Term Success and Innovation
By expanding our scope to become an umbrella foundation, the PyTorch Foundation is uniquely positioned to enhance collaboration, innovation, and sustained growth across the entire AI community. Our mission is clear: create a vendor-neutral, open source environment where the best AI and ML tools can thrive, benefiting users, contributors, and industry stakeholders worldwide.
“PyTorch is absolutely the foundation of the innovation happening in AI today and with projects like Llama, ChatGPT, and hundreds of thousands of open projects built on PyTorch, it has cemented itself as a critical ingredient to the world of AI. This move to create an umbrella foundation enables PyTorch to significantly expand its ecosystem both horizontally and vertically in this new era of agentic systems. I am very excited about this opportunity to take the PyTorch community to the next level!” – Joe Spisak, Product Director for PyTorch at Meta.
“PyTorch sits at the very core of AI today. Meanwhile, the depth of the AI stack has grown dramatically—evolving from enabling accelerated compute to powering fully autonomous systems. Broadening the PyTorch Foundation is a key step in keeping the AI revolution open and accessible to all, across the stack and aligned with the principles PyTorch was built on.” – Luca Antiga, CTO at Lightning AI.
We are incredibly optimistic about the opportunities ahead and excited to welcome new projects into our growing family. The PyTorch Foundation remains deeply committed to driving AI innovation forward, and together, we will continue to build the future of open source artificial intelligence.
Stay tuned for more updates, announcements, and opportunities to participate!