We search less and less with a list of links, and more and more by asking an AI assistant a question. But where does the answer come from? Often from the model’s memory, frozen at its training date, with no source and no licence. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) changes this: the assistant fetches the information directly from those who publish it.
MCP is an open protocol that lets an AI assistant call tools provided by a server: search, read a resource, fill in a text template. The same server works with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code and any assistant that speaks MCP: you write the tool once and it works everywhere.
Launched by Anthropic in November 2024, the protocol was adopted within months by the main assistants and developer tools, then handed over in December 2025 to the Agentic AI Foundation, a foundation of the Linux Foundation. It evolves through dated versions (2024-11-05, 2025-03-26, 2025-06-18, 2025-11-25, 2026-07-28), and a public registry lists the servers.
