Definition
MCP (Anthropic, Nov 2024; adopted by OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft in 2025) is an open protocol between clients (AI apps) and servers (systems like Drive, Slack, GitHub, Postgres). “A USB-C port for AI.”
- M × N → M + N: one client per app and one server per system instead of one connector per pair.
- Three primitives: tools (actions the model can invoke), resources (data it can read), prompts (reusable templates).
- One uniform interface lets the agent’s context carry across tools; a new system is a new server, not a rebuilt agent.
- Security: every server and every tool output is a potential channel for prompt injection.