What does it take to get OpenAI and Anthropic—two rivals within the AI assistant market—to get alongside? Regardless of a basic distinction in route that led Anthropic’s founders to give up 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 information sources.
The answer comes from Anthropic, which developed and launched an open specification known as Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP) in November 2024. MCP establishes a royalty-free protocol that permits AI fashions to attach with exterior information sources and companies with out requiring distinctive integrations for every service.
“Consider MCP as a USB-C port for AI purposes,” wrote Anthropic in MCP’s documentation. The analogy is imperfect, nevertheless it represents the concept that, just like how USB-C unified varied cables and ports (with admittedly a debatable stage of success), MCP goals to standardize how AI fashions hook up with the infoscape round them.
