Anthropic introduced MCP in November 2024 as an open, freely available standard, and other AI vendors and developer tools have since adopted it. Before MCP, connecting an AI assistant to a company's files, databases or business apps meant writing a separate integration for each combination of AI tool and data source. MCP standardizes that connection so a data source built once can work with any MCP-compatible AI application.
The common misconception is that MCP is itself an AI model or an agent. It is a connection standard, similar in spirit to how a USB port standardizes connecting a device rather than doing the device's job. MCP still depends on the permissions and access controls placed around each connection, so a company adopting it needs to decide what each connected source is allowed to expose.