Why we built—and donated—the Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Anthropic's Stuart Ritchie speaks with co-creator David Soria Parra about the development of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard to connect AI to external tools and services—and why Anthropic is donating it to the Linux Foundation. 00:00 - What is MCP? 01:21 - The problem MCP solves 02:46 - The USB-C analogy 03:45 - How MCP began 05:36 - What makes MCP different 08:05 - Community adoption 09:54 - Standards without mandates 11:05 - From Anthropic hackathon to Hacker News 13:37 - The decision to open source 15:18 - Donating MCP to the Linux Foundation 17:27 - The Agentic AI Foundation 20:34 - Criticisms of MCP 28:21 - The future of MCP 30:58 - What have people built with MCP? 32:53 - Advice for non-developers 34:58 - What David is most proud of

David Soria ParraguestStuart Ritchiehost

Dec 11, 202535mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: December 11, 2025
Duration: 35m
Channel: Anthropic
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Anthropic's Stuart Ritchie speaks with co-creator David Soria Parra about the development of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard to connect AI to external tools and services—and why Anthropic is donating it to the Linux Foundation. 00:00 - What is MCP? 01:21 - The problem MCP solves 02:46 - The USB-C analogy 03:45 - How MCP began 05:36 - What makes MCP different 08:05 - Community adoption 09:54 - Standards without mandates 11:05 - From Anthropic hackathon to Hacker News 13:37 - The decision to open source 15:18 - Donating MCP to the Linux Foundation 17:27 - The Agentic AI Foundation 20:34 - Criticisms of MCP 28:21 - The future of MCP 30:58 - What have people built with MCP? 32:53 - Advice for non-developers 34:58 - What David is most proud of

SPEAKERS

David Soria Parra
guest
Co-creator and lead maintainer of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and a member of technical staff at Anthropic.
Stuart Ritchie
host
Host/interviewer for Anthropic content, leading the discussion and questions about MCP.

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Anthropic, featuring David Soria Parra and Stuart Ritchie, Why we built—and donated—the Model Context Protocol (MCP) explores mCP unifies AI tool integrations and moves to neutral stewardship MCP is an open protocol that lets AI applications connect to external tools and services without rewriting integrations for each model or client.

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