Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Anthropic open-sources the Model Context Protocol, a standard for connecting AI assistants to data sources and tools, with SDKs and reference servers.
A client-server protocol so any app can expose tools and data to any model client without bespoke integrations. The launch bundle had the spec and SDKs, local MCP server support in Claude Desktop, and reference servers for Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Git, Postgres and Puppeteer. Early adopters were Block and Apollo, plus dev tools Zed, Replit, Codeium and Sourcegraph.
- Date
- Monday, 25 November 2024
- Lab
- Anthropic
- Kind
- infra
- Access
- open standard
By 2025-12-09 Anthropic reported 10,000+ public MCP servers and integrations in ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Cursor and VS Code (company-reported). Governance moved to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation on that date.
Sources
- www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol
- www.anthropic.com/news/donating-the-model-context-protocol-and-establishing-of-the-agentic
This record was checked against its sources on 6 October 2026. How we check