What does it take to get OpenAI and Anthropic—two rivals within the AI assistant market—to get alongside? Regardless of a elementary distinction in course that led Anthropic’s founders to stop OpenAI in 2020 and later create the Claude AI assistant, a shared technical hurdle has now introduced them collectively: Methods 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 providers with out requiring distinctive integrations for every service.
“Consider MCP as a USB-C port for AI functions,” wrote Anthropic in MCP’s documentation. The analogy is imperfect, but it surely represents the concept, just like how USB-C unified varied cables and ports (with admittedly a debatable degree of success), MCP goals to standardize how AI fashions hook up with the infoscape round them.
