AI
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
What MCP is, why every major AI vendor adopted it in 2025, and the security model engineering teams need to understand before exposing tools.
The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for connecting AI assistants to external tools and data sources. Anthropic published the initial spec in November 2024; by mid-2025 OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and the major IDE vendors had all shipped MCP support. It is now the de facto integration protocol between LLMs and the rest of the software ecosystem.