What does it take to get OpenAI and Anthropic—two opponents within the AI assistant market—to get alongside? Regardless of a elementary distinction in path that led Anthropic’s founders to quit OpenAI in 2020 and later create the Claude AI assistant, a shared technical hurdle has now introduced them collectively: The right way to simply join their AI fashions to exterior knowledge sources.
The answer comes from Anthropic, which developed and launched an open specification known as Model Context Protocol (MCP) in November 2024. MCP establishes a royalty-free protocol that permits AI fashions to attach with outdoors knowledge sources and companies with out requiring distinctive integrations for every service.
“Consider MCP as a USB-C port for AI functions,” wrote Anthropic in MCP’s documentation. The analogy is imperfect, however it represents the concept that, much like how USB-C unified numerous cables and ports (with admittedly a debatable level of success), MCP goals to standardize how AI fashions connect with the infoscape round them.
