Unlocking the Future: AI Companies Revolutionize the Internet with Groundbreaking Technology

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.

It’s also a move that should change up how AI systems operate as we know it. For AI companies, MCP is the new standard for how these systems should access apps, tools, and information — and by extension, how people use the internet.

MCP essentially tells AI models which external tools, data sources, and workflows they’re able to access, then allows them to connect and perform tasks. When someone uses Claude to perform tasks in Slack, for example, MCP is what authorizes and establishes the connection between services. It’s what lets Claude redirect you to Slack and get notified once you’ve logged in. And it lets Slack tell Claude which tools, resources, and features it can access — “essentially a ‘show me what you’ve got,’” Conor Kelly, a product marketing manager for MCP at Anthropic, says.

From the user’s side, this simply means Slack and Claude can easily work together — a “ping-pong of intelligence,” as Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger puts the impact of MCP. When somebody prompts Claude to send a Slack message to a colleague, Claude knows that the Slack MCP server is connected, that a tool exists for sending messages, and that it can access that tool. Once it’s all set, Slack tells Claude that it happened successfully, then Claude tells the user. Message sent.

If you’re familiar with how computers generally worked before AI, this might all sound like a bunch of APIs — and you might recall that web apps and services opening their APIs to one another was the underpinning of the Web 2.0 era, and eventually the enormously lucrative explosion of mobile apps in the app store era. Moving users (and their money) from apps and websites to AI agents is one of the few ways AI companies can even begin to pay off their enormous investments. But AI agents need new kinds of APIs, and MCP seems like the standard those APIs will take. MCP’s webpage, aspirationally, likens it to the ubiquitous USB-C.

MCP started as a pet project by two Anthropic engineers, David Soria Parra and Justin Spahr-Summers. The initial goal wasn’t to build an industry-wide standard. The pair simply wanted Anthropic’s staff base to use Claude more in everyday work. They felt like something was missing in the chatbot: the ability, Soria Parra tells The Verge, to connect “to the outer world that you actually deeply care about, the things you interact with.” His initial name for the service was Claude Connect.

Other Anthropic employees, it turned out, agreed with them. In an October 2024 hackathon, virtually everyone used the protocol to build their projects — “It was this moment in the company when everybody was like, ‘Oh, there’s really something to this,’” Soria Parra says. He and Spahr-Summers got Krieger’s approval to develop a full-fledged open source project. They released it just before Thanksgiving — somewhat deliberately, Soria Parra says, so that people could take a break from family to check it out.

Krieger says that initially, his “dream case” for MCP was getting just one other frontier lab to adopt it. But widespread adoption came fast. On March 19th, Microsoft announced it would support MCP in its Copilot Studio. One week later, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted that “people love MCP and we are excited to add support across our products.” Four days after that, Google CEO Sundar Pichai took a poll approach, posting, “To MCP or not to MCP, that’s the question. Lmk in comments.” The protocol has gotten top billing on a San Francisco billboard, and there are even hints of MCP support in beta versions of iOS, suggesting Apple’s false start on agentic Siri might be turned around by adopting the nascent standard.

MCP has caught on partly because its creators have spent so much time watching and learning what developers actually wanted from AI systems. It “encapsulated patterns that already existed at the time,” says Soria Parra. OpenAI uses MCP to underpin the ChatGPT apps it introduced earlier this year, such as Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Expedia, Figma, Spotify, and Zillow, as well as to connect to services like Notion and HubSpot.