MCP
The USB-C of agent tooling: a single JSON-RPC interface for connecting any agent to any tool, data source, or service.
- name
- MCP
- full_name
- Model Context Protocol
- layer
- capability
- creator
- Anthropic (now governed under the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation)
- status
- de facto standard
- year
- 2024
- one_liner
- The USB-C of agent tooling: a single JSON-RPC interface for connecting any agent to any tool, data source, or service.
- spec_url
- https://modelcontextprotocol.io
- snippet
{ "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "tools/call", "params": { "name": "search", "arguments": { "q": "..." } } }- abbreviation
- MCP
- also_known_as
Model Context Protocol- canonical_spec_url
- https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25
- entity_uri
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_Context_Protocol
- taxonomy_layer
- capability
- sub_layer
- tool-calling
- protocol_type
- tooling
- central_problem
- Gives an AI agent a single, uniform interface to call any external tool, data source, or service instead of bespoke per-integration glue.
- maintainer
- Model Context Protocol project (Anthropic + community), hosted by the Agentic AI Infrastructure Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation
- governance_body
- AAIF
- license
- MIT (spec and SDKs)
- maturity_tag
- production-ready
- current_spec_version
- 2025-11-25
- spec_date
- 2025-11-25
- launch_date
- 2024-11-25
- last_verified
- 2026-06-15
- transport
- JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdio or Streamable HTTP
- core_mechanism
- An MCP client (the agent host) connects to one or more MCP servers; servers advertise tools, resources, and prompts, and the client invokes them with typed JSON-RPC calls (tools/list, tools/call). A November 2025 revision adds an experimental async Tasks primitive.
- discovery_endpoint
- JSON-RPC initialize + tools/list (server-advertised; no fixed URL path)
- settlement_type
- —
- adoption_metric
- Hosted under AAIF as a load-bearing project; broad SDK and vendor support across the agent ecosystem verify-against-primary-at-build ↗ https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol
- notable_adopters
{"value":"Anthropic","source":"https://modelcontextprotocol.io"}- relationships
{"predicate":"governed_by","target":"aaif","note":"MCP -governed_by-> AAIF (research §2 seed triple)"}{"predicate":"complements","target":"a2a","note":"A2A complements MCP; MCP handles agent→tool, A2A handles agent→agent"}{"predicate":"discovered_by","target":"agents-json","note":"agents.txt/agents.json-class discovery files can point agents to MCP endpoints"}- ideal_use_case
- Connecting an LLM agent to your data sources, internal tools, or SaaS APIs through one standard interface.
- when_to_use
- When agents need to take actions or read structured data from tools/services and you want one integration surface instead of N bespoke ones.
- when_not_to_use
- When you only need an agent to read content (use Layer-1 discovery files like llms.txt), or when the interaction is agent-to-agent coordination (use A2A).
- code_example
- { "jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": 1, "method": "tools/call", "params": { "name": "search", "arguments": { "q": "agentic web" } } }
- source
- Spec version/date: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25 (latest stable, 2025-11-25). Governance (AAIF hosts MCP): competitive-research-2026-06.md §2.
- agent_readiness_link
- agent-readiness/mcp
- layer_legacy
- tool