AI Glossary
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
What is Model Context Protocol (MCP)?
An open standard developed by Anthropic for connecting AI models to external tools, data sources, and systems in a standardised way. MCP defines how AI assistants discover and invoke tools, and how tools return results. It is emerging as an industry-standard interface layer for agentic AI applications.
Example in practice
A developer building an AI assistant that needs to access multiple internal tools — a CRM, a document store, and a calendar — would use MCP to connect each tool to the AI in a standardised way rather than writing bespoke integration code for each.