Anthropic open-sources the Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Anthropic introduced MCP, an open standard for connecting AI assistants to data sources and tools; within a year it was adopted by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and most AI developer tools, becoming the de facto agent–tool protocol.
Key facts
- Announced 25 November 2024 with SDKs and reference servers
- Client–server protocol exposing tools, resources and prompts
- OpenAI announced MCP support in March 2025; Google, Microsoft and others followed
- Donated to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation on 9 December 2025
What happened
Anthropic open-sourced a specification and SDKs so any application could expose context and actions to any LLM client.
Why it matters
Solved the N×M integration problem for agents and became core infrastructure of the agentic AI ecosystem.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
- Anthropic releases computer use for Claude 3.5 Sonnet ★★★★
- MCP donated to the Linux Foundation's new Agentic AI Foundation ★★★
Sources (3)
- officialIntroducing the Model Context Protocol (Anthropic)
- docsModel Context Protocol documentation
- codemodelcontextprotocol (GitHub)
id: 2024-11-25-model-context-protocol · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline