MCP has already taken the industry by storm, and now Anthropic is giving it away.

Over the past 18 months, the largest AI companies in the world have quietly settled on an approach to building the next generation of apps and services — an approach that would allow AI agents from any company to easily access information and tools across the internet in a standardized way. It’s a key step toward building a usable ecosystem of AI agents that might actually pay off some of the enormous investments these companies have made, and it all starts with three letters: MCP.

MCP, or Model Context Protocol, began as a passion project from two Anthropic employees, but since its creation in mid-2024, it’s been widely adopted by companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Cursor. There are even hints that Apple will use MCP in its forthcoming AI-enabled version of Siri. There have been competitors to MCP, but so far it’s been a standards war without any real battle — MCP has quickly taken over the industry.

And now it’s official: This week, Anthropic is donating MCP to the Linux Foundation — and joining OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Block, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare in establishing a new fund called the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), whose goal is to “advance open-source agentic AI.” The donation, and assigning a neutral body to govern MCP, will likely help supercharge its growth.

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