What does it take to get OpenAI and Anthropic—two opponents within the AI assistant market—to get alongside? Regardless of a basic 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: Find out how 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 companies with out requiring distinctive integrations for every service.
“Consider MCP as a USB-C port for AI purposes,” wrote Anthropic in MCP’s documentation. The analogy is imperfect, nevertheless it represents the concept, much like how USB-C unified numerous cables and ports (with admittedly a debatable stage of success), MCP goals to standardize how AI fashions hook up with the infoscape round them.
