Why we built—and donated—the Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Anthropic's Stuart Ritchie speaks with co-creator David Soria Parra about the development of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard to connect AI to external tools and services—and why Anthropic is donating it to the Linux Foundation.

00:00 - What is MCP?
01:21 - The problem MCP solves
02:46 - The USB-C analogy
03:45 - How MCP began
05:36 - What makes MCP different
08:05 - Community adoption
09:54 - Standards without mandates
11:05 - From Anthropic hackathon to Hacker News
13:37 - The decision to open source
15:18 - Donating MCP to the Linux Foundation
17:27 - The Agentic AI Foundation
20:34 - Criticisms of MCP
28:21 - The future of MCP
30:58 - What have people built with MCP?
32:53 - Advice for non-developers
34:58 - What David is most proud of