Anthropic introduced the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as an open standard for secure, two-way connections between AI tools and data sources, replacing per-model, per-tool custom integrations with one specification. The release covered the spec and SDKs, local MCP server support in Claude Desktop, and an open-source repository of prebuilt servers for Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Git, Postgres, and Puppeteer. Block and Apollo were named as early adopters, along with the developer tool companies Zed, Replit, Codeium, and Sourcegraph. Anthropic gave away a connection layer that could have been kept as a competitive moat.