History of the Model Context Protocol (MCP)
History of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) Origins (mid-2024) MCP started as an internal fix for an annoyance. In July 2024, Anthropic engineer David Soria Parra got tired of manually copying answers from Claude into his code editor because the model had no way to reach outside tools. He and colleague Justin Spahr-Summers sketched out a protocol to solve that, along with Mahesh Murag. Public…
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) originated in mid-2024 as an internal solution devised by Anthropic engineer David Soria Parra and colleague Justin Spahr-Summers. Their inspiration stemmed from the annoyance of manually copying answers from Claude into his code editor, as the model lacked the capability to connect with external tools.
They collaborated with Mahesh Murag to develop the protocol, which aimed to address the "N×M" integration problem, where a unique connector was required for every combination of AI models and tools.
Anthropic officially launched MCP in November 2024, making it an open standard for integrating AI assistants with various data systems, including content repositories, business tools, and development environments. The initial release of MCP came with SDKs for Python and TypeScript, facilitating its adoption by developers.
Throughout 2025, MCP underwent rapid iteration and gained widespread adoption. In March, Anthropic released a significant specification update, which included OAuth 2.1 for secure communication between agents and servers, as well as Streamable HTTP Transport for real-time bidirectional data flow. This update coincided with the emergence of thousands of community MCP servers on GitHub.
As the year progressed, MCP saw adoption beyond Anthropic, with major players like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and numerous developers integrating it into their production agents.
In November 2025, another major specification update further enhanced MCP by introducing asynchronous operations, statelessness, server identity, and an official community-driven registry for discovering MCP servers. These enhancements solidified MCP's position as a robust and versatile standard.
In December 2025, Anthropic took a significant step by donating MCP to the newly established Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), governed under the Linux Foundation. This move transformed MCP into a vendor-neutral standard, ensuring its long-term sustainability and accessibility beyond Anthropic's direct control.
By mid-2026, MCP had firmly established itself as a mainstream infrastructure technology. AI giants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, VS Code, and Cursor all supported MCP, demonstrating its broad acceptance and utility. Its two most popular SDKs garnered over 470 million downloads within a 30-day period ending July 21, 2026, underscoring the swift and extensive adoption that MCP experienced in a short span.
Community data sources from earlier in the year echoed these figures, reporting over 97 million monthly downloads and 5,800+ active MCP servers, highlighting the protocol's rapid rise in popularity.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
