Model Context Protocol

The full name of MCP — an open standard for LLM-tool interoperability published by Anthropic in November 2024.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the unabbreviated form of MCP. See that entry for the full definition. We keep two glossary entries because both terms are searched independently — “model context protocol” in long-form learning queries, “MCP” in shorter operational ones.

The protocol specification is open and maintained at modelcontextprotocol.io. Servers can be implemented in any language; reference implementations are provided in TypeScript and Python.