What is MCP?

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic in November 2024, that defines how AI applications connect to external tools, data, and services. It replaces bespoke, one-off integrations with a single client–server interface: an MCP server wraps a system — a database, an API, a filesystem, a SaaS product — and advertises what it offers as tools (actions the model can invoke), resources (data the model can read), and prompts (reusable templates); an MCP client, embedded in a host application such as an IDE, chat interface, or agent runtime, discovers those capabilities at runtime and exposes them to the model. Because the protocol is transport-agnostic (local stdio or remote HTTP/SSE) and vendor-neutral, any compliant server works with any compliant client, so an integration written once can be reused across models and applications — the reason it's often described as "a USB-C port for AI."