AIster · The model wars · Products

Anthropic open-sources the Model Context Protocol

A shared standard for connecting AI assistants to apps and data, later taken up by OpenAI

Key facts

Date

25 Nov 2024

Era

The model wars

Interest

Products

Threads

Open vs closed, Agents

Who

Anthropic

What

Specification, SDKs, Claude Desktop support, open-source servers

Adopted by

OpenAI (Mar 2025); Google DeepMind pledged support (Apr 2025)

Anthropic open-sourced (published for anyone to use) the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard way to connect AI assistants to data sources and tools, with ready-made connectors for services such as Google Drive, Slack and GitHub. OpenAI adopted it in March 2025, and in April 2025 Google DeepMind said it would support it in Gemini models.

Sources

1. Anthropic, Introducing the Model Context Protocol, 2024-11-25
2. TechCrunch, OpenAI adopts rival Anthropic's standard for connecting AI models to data, 2025-03-26
3. TechCrunch, Google to embrace Anthropic's standard for connecting AI models to data, 2025-04-09