Anthropic open-sources the Model Context Protocol
Anthropic released MCP as an open standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives, shipping the specification and SDKs, local MCP server support in the Claude Desktop apps, and an open-source repository of pre-built servers for systems like Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, and Postgres.
On November 25, 2024, Anthropic open-sourced the Model Context Protocol, describing it as "a universal, open standard for connecting AI systems with data sources, replacing fragmented integrations with a single protocol." The launch shipped three components: the specification and SDKs, local MCP server support in the Claude Desktop apps, and an open-source repository of pre-built servers for systems including Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Git, Postgres, and Puppeteer.
The announcement named Block and Apollo as early adopters, with development-tools companies Zed, Replit, Codeium, and Sourcegraph working with the protocol. MCP was created at Anthropic by David Soria Parra and Justin Spahr-Summers.
The protocol's first specification revision is recorded here as MCP 2024-11-05: JSON-RPC 2.0 over stateful connections, with resources, prompts, and tools on the server side and sampling on the client side. Every later revision in the spec index builds on it.
Related servers and clients
- Claude Desktop - client
Related spec revisions
- MCP 2024-11-05 - superseded
Related publishers
How was this verified, and what are the sources?
Published · last verified · confidence 0.95.