What Is MCP? Model Context Protocol Explained for 2026

The Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard created by Anthropic in November 2024 that gives large language models a universal, JSON-RPC 2.0-based interface for connecting to external tools, databases, and services. Instead of writing custom connectors for every LLM-plus-tool pair (the N×M problem), developers expose capabilities through MCP servers and consume them through MCP clients … Read more