Anthropic open-sourced the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in late 2024. As 2025 progressed some of the buzz around MCP receded. However, that may be because the focus is now on building concrete implementations that utilize MCP!
So what is MCP? Essentially it is a open standard that lets AI components, such as Agents, interact with external tools without the need to perform the software development that would be required if each tool had a different API.
An AI Agent can utilize tools that help it fulfill its roles and responsibilities:
A single MCP client in the Agent can communicate in the same fashion with different MCP servers. Thus providing the Agent with access to a wide range of tools.
Tools can include such things as databases, knowledge bases, search tools, unstructured data. However, the use of the term tools does not really do justice to the amount of functionality that is available. Checkout https://www.openmcpdirectory.com/servers for an example of an extensive list of MCP servers.
The MCP protocol supports dynamic tool discovery. The client can examine the server for a list of capabilities and description of the tools it supports. This enable the client to use the tools without needing a previously programmed definition.
While not conceived for this use, MCP could also be used for Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication.
For further reading checkout Anthropic’s MCP announcement https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol