Who's who · Open-source projects
Model Context Protocol
Open standard for connecting AI apps and agents to outside tools and data
At a glance
- Founded
- November 2024
- People
- David Soria Parra, Lead maintainer; Den Delimarsky, Lead maintainer
- Known for
- MCP specification, Official SDKs, MCP servers
- Licence
- Apache 2.0 for code and spec (older parts MIT); docs CC BY 4.0
- Funding
- Open-source project of the Agentic AI Foundation (Linux Foundation)
- Monthly SDK downloads
- 97M+ (Dec 2025)
- Steward
- Agentic AI Foundation, Linux Foundation
- Website
- https://modelcontextprotocol.io
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting AI applications to outside tools, data sources and systems. Instead of writing a custom connector for each pairing, a developer builds an MCP server once and any MCP-aware app can use it. It is supported in ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Visual Studio Code, among others.
Anthropic released MCP in November 2024 with a specification, software development kits (SDKs), local server support in the Claude desktop app and ready-made servers for tools such as Google Drive, Slack, GitHub and Postgres. By December 2025 there were more than 10,000 active public MCP servers and over 97 million monthly downloads of its Python and TypeScript SDKs.
In December 2025 Anthropic donated MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI. MCP keeps its own technical governance. Lead maintainers David Soria Parra and Den Delimarsky make final decisions, working with a group of core maintainers; seats belong to individuals, and none is reserved for a company. Changes go through Specification Enhancement Proposals. New code and specifications are licensed under Apache 2.0, older contributions stay under MIT until their authors agree to relicense, and documentation uses CC BY 4.0.
Sources
- Anthropic, Introducing the Model Context Protocol, 2024-11-25
- Anthropic, Donating the Model Context Protocol and establishing the Agentic AI Foundation, 2025-12-09
- Model Context Protocol, Governance and stewardship, 2026-10-02
- GitHub, modelcontextprotocol licence, 2026-10-02
Facts last checked 2026-10-02