What Is MCP? How Anthropic's Model Context Protocol Connects AI to External Tools

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Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard introduced and open-sourced by Anthropic to enable AI applications to communicate with external tools, databases, and services in a standardized way. Before MCP, developers building AI apps had to write separate integration code for every external system, leading to duplicated effort and tight coupling across frameworks. MCP solves this by acting as a universal bridge between large language models and outside systems such as APIs, file storage, and enterprise applications. The protocol handles tool discovery, execution, and result retrieval, while the underlying LLM retains decision-making over which tool to invoke. MCP is increasingly being adopted as an industry-wide standard, reducing the need to rewrite integration logic when switching between AI frameworks.

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