Model Context Protocol (MCP) Explained: The Open Standard Reshaping AI Development
Dev.to AI
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Generative AI
AI Research
If you have been following the AI tooling space closely, you have probably heard "MCP" mentioned and over the past year. It started as an Anthropic project in late 2024. By mid-2025 it had become an industry standard that OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and Salesforce all adopted. By early 2026 it was donated to the Linux Foundation and tens of thousands of MCP servers existed in the wild. And yet most developers still do not have a clean mental model of what MCP actually is.