Model Context Protocol (MCP) was created in late 2024 by OpenAI’s top competitor Anthropic. It was so good as a means for providing a standardized way to connect AI models to various data sources and tools that OpenAI adopted it as a standard, as have most other big AI players and all three hyperscalers.
In just a few months, MCP has caught fire, with several thousand MCP servers now available from a wide range of vendors enabling AI assistants to connect to their data and services. And with agentic AI increasingly seen as the future of IT, MCP — and related protocols ACP and Agent2Agent — will only grow in use in the enterprise.
But as organizations rushing into AI are beginning to find out, innovations like MCP also come with significant risks.