Starting point

Anthropic launched MCP in late 2024, it picked up community interest by Feb’25. The talk presented by the Anthropic team below is the perfect starting point, a lot has happened since this doc was last updated.

Anthropic -MCP talk at AI Engineer Summit

This is the summary of the Youtube video of Building with MCP presented by Anthropic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQmXtrmQ5Zg

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Workshop Summary

Overview:

The workshop, led by Mahesh from Anthropic, focuses on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – an open protocol designed to standardize how AI applications interact with external systems. MCP aims to solve the problem of fragmented AI development by providing a universal interface for AI apps and agents to access various tools and data sources.

Motivation and Philosophy:

The core idea behind MCP is that "models are only as good as the context we provide to them." The protocol seeks to move beyond manual context provision (copy-pasting) to systems where models have direct, standardized hooks into external data and tools. MCP draws inspiration from APIs (for web app interaction) and the Language Server Protocol (LSP) for IDEs.

MCP Components and Interfaces:

MCP standardizes AI interactions through three primary interfaces:

• Prompts: User-controlled, predefined templates for common interactions with a specific server. Example: Slash commands in IDEs.
• Tools: Model-controlled functions exposed by the server that the LLM can choose to invoke. Enables read/write actions, database updates, file system interactions, etc.
• Resources: Data exposed to the application, controlled by the application. Can be static or dynamic (interpolated with user context). Used for richer interactions beyond text (e.g., attachments in Claude).