AI agent glossary
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
An open standard for connecting AI applications to external tools and data, so one integration works across many different agents.
The Model Context Protocol, introduced by Anthropic in late 2024 and donated in December 2025 to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, defines a common way for AI applications to talk to outside systems. Before MCP, every agent needed its own custom integration for every service. With MCP, a service is wrapped once as an MCP server and works with any compatible client.
An MCP server can offer tools, which are actions the model can call; resources, which are data the application can read; and prompts, which are reusable templates. The host application's MCP client discovers these and makes them available to the model.
Think of MCP as a universal adapter. It does not make an agent smarter on its own, but it makes it far easier to give an agent the right capabilities.
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