An open protocol developed by Anthropic for connecting LLMs to external data sources, tools, and systems — standardizes how AI applications discover and call capabilities provided by separate MCP servers.
MCP defines a client/server protocol where an LLM application (the client) connects to one or more MCP servers, each exposing tools, resources (data), and prompts. The model can discover what's available via MCP, then call into the relevant capability without bespoke integration code per data source. Implementations exist for filesystems, databases, GitHub, Slack, and many other systems. MCP is becoming the standard 'USB-C for AI tools' in the agent ecosystem.
Connecting Claude Desktop to a local SQLite MCP server so the user can ask 'what were last quarter's top customers' and Claude queries the DB directly.
MCP eliminates the per-integration glue code each AI app would otherwise need — building one MCP server makes a capability available to every MCP-compatible AI client.
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