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Model Context Protocol

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard introduced by Anthropic in 2024 that defines a universal interface for connecting large language models to external tools, data sources, and services.

6 min readLast updated June 2026Infrastructure

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that defines a common interface for large language models (LLMs) and AI agents to communicate with external tools, data repositories, and services. Introduced by Anthropic in November 2024, MCP addresses a fragmentation problem in the AI tooling landscape: before its introduction, each AI application required bespoke integrations with every external system it needed to access, resulting in duplicated effort and brittle pipelines. MCP provides a single, standardised protocol that any AI system and any external service can implement once, enabling interoperability across the ecosystem.

Background and Motivation

As AI systems evolved from stateless question-answering interfaces to agentic applications capable of taking sequences of actions, the need to connect models to real-world systems became acute. Developers building AI assistants needed to integrate with databases, APIs, file systems, communication platforms, calendar services, and countless other tools. Without a standard, every integration was a point-to-point custom implementation, requiring the AI application developer to understand the specific API of every service and the service developer to know nothing about the AI application.

MCP draws an analogy to the USB standard in hardware: just as USB allowed any device to connect to any host without custom cables, MCP allows any AI application to connect to any tool server without custom glue code.

Technical Architecture

MCP follows a client-server architecture with three primary roles.

The host is the application in which the AI model runs — an IDE, a chat interface, or a custom AI workflow. The client is the MCP client library embedded in the host, which manages connections to MCP servers. The server is a lightweight service that exposes a specific capability — for example, a file system server, a web search server, or a database server.

Servers expose capabilities through three primitive types. Tools are functions the model can invoke to perform actions, such as executing a database query or sending an API request. Resources are data objects the model can read, such as file contents or structured records. Prompts are server-provided instruction templates that shape how the model interacts with the server's domain.

The protocol uses JSON-RPC 2.0 as its message format and supports two transport mechanisms: standard input/output for local processes and HTTP with Server-Sent Events for networked services. SDKs were released for Python, TypeScript, C#, and Java.

Sampling and Agentic Loops

MCP also defines a sampling primitive that allows servers to request completions from the host model, enabling multi-hop agentic workflows in which servers can themselves trigger model reasoning. This bidirectional capability distinguishes MCP from simpler tool-calling conventions and enables complex orchestration patterns.

Industry Adoption

Following its release, MCP gained rapid adoption across the AI industry. In March 2025, OpenAI adopted MCP and integrated it into ChatGPT desktop and API products. Google DeepMind confirmed MCP support in Gemini models in April 2025. Microsoft, Cloudflare, Block, and numerous independent tool providers released MCP servers for their services.

By mid-2025, the Python and JavaScript SDKs for MCP servers were recording over 20 million weekly downloads. The ecosystem grew to include thousands of community-contributed MCP servers covering tools ranging from GitHub and Slack to PostgreSQL, Stripe, and proprietary enterprise APIs.

In December 2025, Anthropic donated MCP governance to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund under the Linux Foundation co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI. This move placed MCP on a neutral governance footing, reducing concerns about vendor lock-in and accelerating enterprise adoption.

Comparison with Alternative Approaches

Prior to MCP, the dominant approach to connecting AI models to tools was function calling — a pattern supported by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google APIs where developers define tool schemas in JSON that the model can invoke during generation. Function calling remains the mechanism by which a model decides to use a tool; MCP standardises the layer between the AI application and the tool implementations themselves. The two are complementary rather than competing.

OpenAPI specifications and plugin systems (including early ChatGPT Plugins) addressed related problems but lacked the bidirectional agentic primitives and the formal governance structure that MCP provides.

See Also

References

  1. Anthropic. (2024). Introducing the Model Context Protocol. Anthropic Blog. https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol
  2. Model Context Protocol. (2025). Specification 2025-11-25. modelcontextprotocol.io. https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25
  3. Linux Foundation. (2025). Agentic AI Foundation established to govern Model Context Protocol. Linux Foundation Press Release.
  4. Pento. (2025). A year of MCP: From internal experiment to industry standard. Pento Blog. https://www.pento.ai/blog/a-year-of-mcp-2025-review
  5. Cuttlesoft. (2025). Model Context Protocol: The standard for AI tool integration. Cuttlesoft Blog.