Model Context Protocol, introduced by Anthropic in late 2024, is an open standard for connecting models to external tools, data sources, and prompts. Think of it as USB for AI: instead of writing custom integration code for every model + every tool combination, you write a server once and any MCP-compatible client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, ChatGPT) can use it.
The wins: tool reuse across models, clean separation between agent logic and integrations, and a real ecosystem of pre-built servers (GitHub, Slack, Postgres, filesystems). The thing to watch: security. An MCP server is a remote-execution surface; treat permissions and authentication accordingly.
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