Anthropic released Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Nov. 2024. In its seven months of existence, MCP seems to have become the winning protocol choice for the AI industry. Despite the number of companies announcing MCP servers, MCP is technically not a standard.
Enterprises that set up MCP servers believe that establishing the infrastructure for interoperability should start now. Many see MCP as one of the main protocols, if not the potential winner, for the agentic ecosystem.
MCP is one of the few protocols that have emerged as a way for agents built using one language model or framework to interact with an agent on a different framework. The idea behind MCP and other protocols like Agent2Agent from Google and its partners, AGNTCY from Cisco and a collective of companies, and from independent research groups like LOKA, is to find and establish an interoperability standard that everyone follows.
“My take on the real reason why interoperability and tool use has really emerged in the last six months or so is because, just like with the cell phone or with anything else, I think we're finally reaching a critical level of capability that the LLMs have to use these tools effectively,” said Jeff Wang, cofounder of AI-powered web search API company Exa, in an interview with VentureBeat.
