Term
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
An open standard for AI assistants to communicate with external tools, data, and services.
MCP lets Claude (and other LLMs) discover and invoke tools without custom integration code. A server exposes tools, resources, and prompts over JSON-RPC; the client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.) connects and can call them.
Created by Anthropic in late 2024 and adopted by OpenAI, Google, and most AI devtools by 2025-Q2. Over 2000 community-built servers exist today.