Introducing the Model Context Protocol

Anthropic has open-sourced the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI assistants to data sources such as content repositories, business tools, and development environments. The article says MCP replaces fragmented, custom integrations with a single protocol, so developers can build against one standard instead of maintaining separate connectors for each data source. MCP was created at Anthropic by David Soria Parra and Justin Spahr-Summers, and early adopters named include Block and Apollo. Pre-built MCP servers are available for Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Git, Postgres, and Puppeteer, and Claude Desktop apps support local MCP servers.