When Databricks pioneered Delta Sharing in 2021, we set out to solve a problem that every data team knew too well: sharing live data across organizational boundaries was slow, fragile, and full of compromise. You either copied data — creating stale replicas and compliance headaches — or you constrained yourself to only sharing with partners on the same platform as you, thereby significantly restricting innovation.

Delta Sharing changed that. A single open protocol. No data copying. No platform silos. And in the five years since, it has become the most widely adopted open zero-copy data-sharing protocol — with 28,000+ data recipients and 33% of shares flowing across platforms via open connectors. Leading companies such as SAP, Atlassian, Mercedes-Benz, The Trade Desk, LSEG, S&P Global, and many more have adopted Delta Sharing to share and collaborate on data.

But the world has moved on. The rise of agentic AI has fundamentally changed what enterprises need to share. Today, we're taking the next step.

We're excited to announce OpenSharing — the next evolution of Delta Sharing, and the industry's first open protocol built for the agentic era. OpenSharing advances Delta Sharing into an independent open-source project, expanding its scope from data sharing to the full AI stack: models, agents — across any cloud, any vendor, and any format.

Delta Sharing was built for a world of tables and files. But organizations must now exchange semantic context, AI skills, unstructured data, and autonomous agents across cloud, vendor, and company boundaries. Today's sharing protocols remain locked into vendor-specific formats, can't handle AI logic, and depend on brittle networking that takes weeks to configure for each new partner.

The result: collaboration slows, data silos persist, and the value locked inside enterprise data goes unrealized.