Anthropic created and open-sourced the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a technical standard that gives AI models a consistent way to connect to external tools, databases, and applications — similar to how USB-C gives devices a universal port for charging and data transfer. MCP has been adopted by major technology companies including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, and reaches over 100 million monthly downloads.

MCP launched in November 2024, designed by Anthropic engineers David Soria Parra and Justin Spahr-Summers. It uses a structured communication format (JSON-RPC 2.0) to standardize connections between AI models and external systems. Anthropic donated MCP to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation in December 2025, signaling its intent for MCP to become a vendor-neutral, industry-wide standard. Anthropic operates a marketplace of MCP connectors for services including Slack, Google Drive, GitHub, Notion, Salesforce, and multiple financial data providers. Early adopters included developer tools such as Cursor, Replit, and Sourcegraph. Security researchers raised concerns in early implementations about prompt injection vulnerabilities in MCP server setups.