MCP - do we really need a protocol for AI?
Published on: | by Uditha Atukorala
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is intended to be a standard for applications to share contexts and capabilities with Large language models (LLMs), and was created by Anthropic and open-sourced on November 25th, 20251.
There’s a lot of hype around MCP these days and MCP claims it’s like USB-C for AI applications2.
“MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs. Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications. Just as USB-C provides a standardized way to connect your devices to various peripherals and accessories, MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools.”
Under the hood, MCP uses JSON-RPC to enable communication between AI applications and integrations that could provide “contexts and capabilities”3. The protocol itself doesn’t provide any security or trust guarantees and it’s up-to the implementors to consider authentication, access control, data protection, privacy, security etc.
But why do we need a specific protocol like MCP for AI applications to be able to communicate with integrations? Don’t we have enough protocols already and can’t the “intelligence” in AI work with existing protocols?
There are many clients and servers that communicate with each other and securely share contexts (i.e. data) and capabilities (i.e. service discovery) using well known protocols, like JSON+REST, gRPC, heck even SOAP. All using good old software logic. So why can’t AI use these protocols? Why would AI need a specific protocol?
Spoiler alert, it doesn’t!
MCP is creating an eco-system for the community (and third-parties) to build integrations for Anthropic’s Claude for Desktop. Which benefits Anthropic and it’s no different to other platforms providing tools for third-parties to build apps and integrations (e.g. App stores, plugins etc.).
While Anthropic benefits from MCP, I feel the rest of us are very likely to end up with a pile of garbage due to MCPs being built out of FOMO.
Anyone remember blockchain? Web3?
Or maybe I’m being pessimistic, maybe there are more pragmatic humans in this world than I realise.