Model Context Protocol

Anthropic released «Model Context Protocol» in November 2024 as an open standard for live access to tools and data. Within a year the reported figures were 97 million monthly SDK downloads and more than 10,000 active servers. Didier Girard's note of 2 August 2026 fixes the boundary that gets confused most often: MCP binds an agent to its tools, «Agent Client Protocol» binds a client to an agent, and the two stack.

MCP shows up more often as a component inside other people's designs than as a subject of its own. Google's «Agent Plugins» 1.0.0 specification (6 August 2026) packages Agent Skills and MCP servers in a single directory, declaring each server in mcp.json with an explicit type per entry, which removes transport inference (stdio, Streamable HTTP, the historical HTTP+SSE). Anthropic is not listed among that specification's maintainers. «Universal Commerce Protocol», launched by Sundar Pichai at NRF 2026, counts MCP as one of four transports. «QMD», «MCP-UI», Anthropic's «Desktop Extensions» and Aristidis Vasilopoulos's third documentation tier all reach agents through an MCP server.

That tool access cuts both ways. Anthropic's report of 13 November 2025 attributes to a Chinese state-sponsored group a campaign in which «Claude Code» reached web search, password crackers and network scanners through MCP. Janakiram MSV raises a separate objection: MCP and its peer protocols supply nearly all the primitives, but not the lifecycle of versioning, promotion and rollback. The Linux Foundation's «Agentic AI Foundation» hosts the project. No open contract yet covers what happens after deployment.