MCP Python SDK

license

MIT(OSI)

source

public

core-gated

ungated

Fully MIT reference SDK. The LICENSE is the plain MIT License, "Copyright (c) 2024 Anthropic, PBC" - worth stating because the sibling MCP repos are not: modelcontextprotocol/typescript-sdk and modelcontextprotocol/servers have both moved to the project's Apache-2.0 transition license, and this one has not. PyPI agrees, classifying `mcp` as "OSI Approved :: MIT License". The whole SDK is in the published repo and installs from PyPI with no key or paid tier, so core-gated stays ungated.

• https://pypi.org/project/mcp/ recorded 2026-08-13

  Package `mcp`. "License MIT License (MIT)", classifier "OSI Approved :: MIT License", "This project is licensed under the MIT License." Author - Model Context Protocol a Series of LF Projects, LLC; maintainer David Soria Parra. Latest release 2026-07-28.

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk/main/LICENSE recorded 2026-08-13

  Plain MIT License text: "Copyright (c) 2024 Anthropic, PBC". No Apache-2.0 transition preamble, unlike the typescript-sdk and servers repositories.

• https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk recorded 2026-08-13

  Repo page, 24,000 stargazers. The whole SDK is in the tree; install is `uv add "mcp[cli]"` with no key. No enterprise directory, second license or paid tier.

333,111,291 downloads of `mcp` in the trailing 30 days, which bands at >10M, level 5 on the software adoption scale. The package is first-party rather than a squatted name: PyPI gives its repository as github.com/modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk and its author as "Model Context Protocol a Series of LF Projects, LLC".

• https://pypistats.org/api/packages/mcp/recent recorded 2026-08-12

  333,111,291 downloads in the trailing 30 days for mcp

Most complete Python MCP toolkit. The README enumerates servers exposing "tools, resources, and prompts to any MCP host", clients, and "Speak every standard transport: stdio, Streamable HTTP, and SSE"; the value is held to what that page supports, and the 5 rests on this still being the reference implementation of the protocol in Python, carrying every transport the spec defines.

• https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk recorded 2026-08-13

  README - build MCP servers exposing tools, resources and prompts to any host; build MCP clients; "Speak every standard transport: stdio, Streamable HTTP, and SSE". The `cli` extra adds `mcp dev`, `mcp run` and `mcp install`. NOT on the page: FastMCP, OAuth 2.1, structured output or elicitation.