MCP started as a pet project by two Anthropic engineers, David Soria Parra and Justin Spahr-Summers. The initial goal wasn\u2019t to build an industry-wide standard. The pair simply wanted Anthropic\u2019s staff base to use Claude more in everyday work. They felt like something was missing in the chatbot: the ability, Soria Parra tells The Verge, to connect \u201cto the outer world that you actually deeply care about, the things you interact with.\u201d His initial name for the service was Claude Connect.<\/p>\n
Other Anthropic employees, it turned out, agreed with them. In an October 2024 hackathon, virtually everyone used the protocol to build their projects \u2014 \u201cIt was this moment in the company when everybody was like, \u2018Oh, there\u2019s really something to this,\u2019\u201d Soria Parra says. He and Spahr-Summers got Krieger\u2019s approval to develop a full-fledged open source project. They released it just before Thanksgiving \u2014 somewhat deliberately, Soria Parra says, so that people could take a break from family to check it out.<\/p>\n
The protocol has gotten top billing on a San Francisco billboard.<\/p>\n
Krieger says that initially, his \u201cdream case\u201d for MCP was getting just one other frontier lab to adopt it. But widespread adoption came fast. On March 19th, Microsoft announced<\/a> it would support MCP in its Copilot Studio. One week later, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted<\/a> that \u201cpeople love MCP and we are excited to add support across our products.\u201d Four days after that, Google CEO Sundar Pichai took a poll approach, posting<\/a>, \u201cTo MCP or not to MCP, that\u2019s the question. Lmk in comments.\u201d The protocol has gotten top billing on a San Francisco billboard<\/a>, and there are even hints of MCP support in beta versions of iOS<\/a>, suggesting Apple\u2019s false start on agentic Siri might be turned around by adopting the nascent standard.<\/p>\n MCP has caught on partly because its creators have spent so much time watching and learning what developers actually wanted from AI systems. It \u201cencapsulated patterns that already existed at the time,\u201d says Soria Parra. OpenAI uses MCP to underpin the ChatGPT apps it introduced earlier this year, such as Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Expedia, Figma, Spotify, and Zillow, as well as to connect to services like Notion and HubSpot. Anthropic uses it to enable connections with Slack, Asana, Box, Square, Stripe, and many others<\/a>.<\/p>\n At this point, MCP has effectively become a multi-company project. A group of \u201ccore maintainers\u201d have an ongoing discussion on Discord and GitHub, and representatives from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others periodically meet face-to-face, discussing ways to fix problems and improve the protocol, OpenAI\u2019s Nick Cooper, technical lead for the company\u2019s approach to MCP, tells The Verge.<\/p>\n But MCP\u2019s links with Anthropic have also potentially held the standard back. Anthropic has always made the protocol open source, but until now, any improvements by other companies could potentially contribute to their competitor\u2019s intellectual property \u2014 and in theory, Anthropic could still one day choose to lock it down. Giving it to the Linux Foundation removes those concerns.<\/p>\n Anthropic isn\u2019t the only company handing over something to the Linux Foundation. Block is donating Goose, its open-source AI agent, and OpenAI is donating Agents.md, which describes codebases to agents. Put the donations from Block, OpenAI, and Anthropic together, and the story is \u201cabout more than just MCP,\u201d says Jackie Brosamer, head of data and AI at Block. \u201cProtocols are essentially ways for systems to talk to each other, and that\u2019s the most important thing to standardize.\u201d<\/p>\n MCP\u2019s links with Anthropic have also potentially held the standard back.<\/p>\n Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation \u2014 the largest organization for open source and standards in the world \u2014 has been in the industry for more than two decades and has personally overseen the creation or expansion of a handful of new standards and platforms. But even he has been shocked by MCP\u2019s grassroots growth.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything like this,\u201d Zemlin tells The Verge. \u201cI can barely keep up with the number of inbound calls from organizations who want to be a part of this. Usually I\u2019m trying to convince someone, or scratching and clawing. This is really the reverse.\u201d<\/p>\n Josh Blyskal, who leads strategy and research for AEO (think: essentially SEO for AI) at Profound, believes MCP will \u201cabsolutely become a standard, especially in commerce,\u201d and he says in a year, the way AI companies currently scrape websites will look \u201cantiquated.\u201d<\/p>\n Krieger says that although he thinks there is still a future for people accessing services directly in apps and browsers, \u201cthere\u2019s something very powerful\u201d about an internet where most interactions run through MCP. \u201cThese things can operate kind of at the speed of LLMs versus at the speed of people,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can issue 10 queries in parallel, you can do a data deep dive, versus navigating the web as was built for humans.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody was like, \u2018Oh, there\u2019s really something to this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n MCP is also gaining traction as the industry faces a major problem: Although agents are an almost necessary step to making AI profitable, most of them simply don\u2019t work very well<\/a> right now. There are valuable enterprise uses, because enterprise environments can be more tightly controlled and made predictable for the agents to operate in. But for a range of consumer tasks, they\u2019re still slower and less reliable than simply using the web yourself. And part of the reason is that they\u2019re often surfing a web made for humans, not machines, to pull information from.<\/p>\n MCP may have improved agents somewhat already, but AI companies hope if it\u2019s adopted more widely, it could dramatically mitigate the hangups frustrating users: that agents lag, that they require too much coaxing in order to complete a task, that they sometimes fail to perform a task at all. The protocol allows systems to talk directly between each other, ideally making them faster, more accurate, and more successful. Instead of an \u201capp store,\u201d the dream is to one day create a marketplace of tools for agents to use MCP to connect with \u2014 and when it comes to e-commerce, some of those tools will allow agents to \u201cshop\u201d on a user\u2019s behalf, picking between price and performance based on a user\u2019s budget. Users wouldn\u2019t even need to learn MCP\u2019s name; they\u2019d just realize one day that agents can do something like plan a full trip \u2014 from booking flights and hotels to adding calendar reminders \u2014 faster than they can.<\/p>\n That might be the vision, but jumping feet-first into a specific standard like MCP is still a big bet. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said<\/a> it was a mistake for the company to invest so much in HTML5 at the dawn of the mobile era instead of native apps, for example. And HTTP won out in the early days of the internet over other protocols, like Gopher, which was developed at the University of Minnesota in the early 1990s. \u201cAnytime you pick technology, it\u2019s an implicit futures contract, because you want that technology to have a big ecosystem, lots of support, tons of developers,\u201d Zemlin says.<\/p>\n \u201cStandards can come and go,\u201d Soria Parra says. \u201cI don\u2019t know what the AI industry will look like five years from now, and I think nobody\u2019s able to predict this. Of course I would hope that MCP is still around.\u201d Whatever happens, though, he says, \u201cat least we have set the [stage] for more open standards in the field.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re an end user and you don\u2019t know much about technology, you should never have to hear about MCP,\u201d says Soria Parra. \u201cIt should just work \u2026 For you, the model just does its magic and solves the task at hand.\u201d<\/p>\n The move could also help mitigate the security nightmares that agentic AI poses, like prompt injection<\/a>. Now that Anthropic won\u2019t have ownership over MCP, other companies especially well versed in security can make improvements to the protocol that they may have shied away from making before. \u201cOne thing I think is really important about having this be more of an open project is that there are aspects that we as Anthropic don\u2019t hit first, but other enterprises do \u2014 so authentication and security are two,\u201d Krieger says.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen everybody is working collectively on a standard, to help improve the technology so that it\u2019s more secure, so that it can do effective trusted payments, so that it has a better way of communicating in a secure fashion, that\u2019s when the market really gets made,\u201d Zemlin says.<\/p>\n Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Hayden FieldClose Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All by Hayden Field<\/a><\/p>\n AICloseAI<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All AI<\/a><\/p>\n AmazonCloseAmazon<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n AnthropicCloseAnthropic<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All Anthropic<\/a><\/p>\n GoogleCloseGoogle<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All Google<\/a><\/p>\n OpenAICloseOpenAI<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All OpenAI<\/a><\/p>\n ReportCloseReport<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n![\"Hayden](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1765398009_50_HAYDEN_BLURPLE.jpg\"\/)
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