History of the Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Origins (mid-2024)
MCP started as an internal fix for an annoyance. In July 2024, Anthropic engineer David Soria Parra got tired of manually copying answers from Claude into his code editor because the model had no way to reach outside tools. He and colleague Justin Spahr-Summers sketched out a protocol to solve that, along with Mahesh Murag.
Public Launch — November 25, 2024
Anthropic introduced MCP as an open standard for connecting AI assistants to data systems like content repositories, business tools, and dev environments, shipping it with SDKs for Python and TypeScript. The goal was fixing the "N×M" integration problem — needing a custom connector for every AI-tool pairing.
