## 1. Overview ### Open protocol introduced by Anthropic (Nov 2024) ### Donated to the Agentic AI Foundation (Linux Foundation, Dec 2025) ### Standardises LLM-to-tool and LLM-to-data integration ## 2. Architecture ### Client-server model ### JSON-RPC 2.0 message framing ### Transports: stdio, HTTP ### Stateful conversation between client and server ## 3. Core Primitives ### Tools (callable functions exposed by servers) ### Resources (readable data the server exposes) ### Prompts (server-provided prompt templates) ## 4. Capability Negotiation ### Initialize handshake ### Capability advertisement per side ## 5. Ecosystem (2026 snapshot) ### 97M+ monthly SDK downloads ### 10,000+ active servers in production ### Hundreds of integrated AI clients ## 6. Extensions ### MCP Apps (SEP-1865) — interactive UI delivery from server to host ## 7. Security model ### Server-scoped credentials ### Least-privilege principle for tool surfaces ### References - https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25 - https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_Context_Protocol - https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol