The Model Context Protocol, released by Anthropic in late 2024, is an open standard that lets an AI Agent connect to external systems — filesystems, databases, email, calendars, arbitrary APIs — through one well-defined interface. Instead of writing a bespoke integration per host, you implement an MCP server once and clients such as Claude Desktop, Cursor, or Claude Code can all consume it. The protocol runs over JSON-RPC and is built around three primitives: tools, resources, and prompts. The community shipped hundreds of off-the-shelf servers within months, and many observers now describe MCP as the "USB-C" of the agent ecosystem.
External Links