Product / UX / Agent tools & protocols

Model Context Protocol

Open standard for connecting AI agents to external tools and data sources. Defines how agents discover, authenticate with, and invoke tools via a JSON-RPC protocol. Rapidly adopted across the agent ecosystem; supported by Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code Copilot, Windsurf, and dozens of IDE and agent frameworks. The emerging universal standard for agent-tool communication, with 86K+ stars on the reference server repo.

Open wire protocol for connecting LLMs/agents to tools and data; created by Anthropic (David Soria Parra, Justin Spahr-Summers), launched 25 Nov 2024. Reference spec + SDKs (Python/TypeScript/C#/Java/Go/Rust/Ruby) verified live on GitHub June 2026. Governance donated to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) Dec 2025.

Openness

5 high confidence

5.0

spec+reference-SDKs: public
license: Apache-2.0(OSI, new code/spec)+MIT(OSI, legacy contributions)+CC-BY-4.0(docs)
governance: Linux-Foundation/AAIF(open, co-founded Anthropic/Block/OpenAI)

Open protocol with OSI-licensed reference implementations and open foundation governance; no feature-gated core.

https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol/blob/main/LICENSE recorded 2026-06-04
Apache-2.0 (new code/spec) + MIT (legacy) + CC-BY-4.0 (docs) license text
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_Context_Protocol recorded 2026-06-04
Anthropic origin; donated to Linux Foundation AAIF Dec 2025

Adoption

5 high confidence

5.0

De facto standard agent tool protocol. ~97M monthly SDK downloads in Mar 2026 (up from ~2M at Nov 2024 launch); adopted natively by OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google DeepMind (Gemini), Microsoft, AWS; >16,000 MCP servers in the wild (Nerq Q1 2026 census indexed 17,468). Native client/agent support breadth is the headline MCP signal per recipe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_Context_Protocol recorded 2026-06-04
adoption by OpenAI/Google DeepMind/Microsoft/AWS; SDKs across 7+ languages
https://zuplo.com/blog/one-year-of-mcp recorded 2026-06-04
~97M monthly SDK downloads Mar 2026, 4,750% growth since launch (corroborating aggregator)

Capability

not assessed

A wire protocol is not benchmarked; capability is not a meaningful axis per recipe. Openness + adoption carry the signal.

Unchanged since 2026-06-09 (last edited, not re-checked)