Why MCP?

On 25 November 2024 Anthropic published the Model Context Protocol with a one-sentence diagnosis of the problem it was meant to solve: "Every new data source requires its own custom implementation, making truly connected systems difficult to scale." Twenty months later the protocol's four best-supported SDKs were being downloaded close to half a billion times a month, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft had adopted it, and Anthropic had handed it to a Linux Foundation fund. Protocols rarely spread that fast. This one did because every company building an AI application was paying the same integration tax, and MCP let each of them pay it once.