Anthropic Open Sourced a New Standard for Connecting Assistants to AI Models

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IBL News
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IBL News | New York

Anthropic, the creator of the Claude chatbot, open-sourced yesterday a new standard called Model Context Protocol (MCP) for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives. The standard aims to produce better, more relevant responses to queries. MCP works for any model, not just Anthropic’s.

AI assistants have gained mainstream adoption, but even the most sophisticated models are constrained by their isolation from data—trapped behind information silos and legacy systems. Every new data source requires custom implementation, making truly connected systems challenging to scale.

Anthropic explained that MCP addresses this challenge by providing a universal, open standard for connecting AI systems with data sources, replacing fragmented integrations with a single protocol. “The result is a simpler, more reliable way for AI systems to access the data they need,” the company said.

The architecture is straightforward: developers can expose their data through MCP servers or build AI applications (MCP clients) that connect to these servers.

There are three major components of the Model Context Protocol for developers:

To help developers start exploring, Anthropic shared pre-built MCP servers for popular enterprise systems like Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Git, Postgres, and Puppeteer.

Early adopters like Block and Apollo have integrated MCP into their systems, while development tools companies, including Zed, Replit, Codeium, and Sourcegraph, are working with MCP to enhance their platforms.

This enables AI agents to retrieve relevant information more effectively, understand the context surrounding a coding task more fully, and produce more nuanced and functional code with fewer attempts.

“Open technologies like the Model Context Protocol are the bridges that connect AI to real-world applications, ensuring innovation is accessible, transparent, and rooted in collaboration,” said Dhanji R. Prasanna, Chief Technology Officer at Block.

MCP ostensibly solves this problem through a protocol that enables developers to build two-way connections between data sources and AI-powered chatbots and applications. Developers can expose data through “MCP servers” and create “MCP clients” — for instance, apps and workflows — that connect to those servers on command.

Rivals like OpenAI prefer that customers and ecosystem partners use their data-connecting approaches and specifications. OpenAI has said it plans to bring the capability, called Work with Apps, to other types of apps.