MCP
Anthropic's open standard for connecting LLMs to external tools and data sources over JSON-RPC.
Definition
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard from Anthropic that lets LLM clients (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, and others) connect to tool servers and data sources over JSON-RPC. An MCP server exposes a set of tools and resources; an MCP client discovers and calls them. The protocol is transport-agnostic — stdio, HTTP, or WebSocket — and decouples the LLM from per-integration glue code.
When to use
Use MCP when you want a Claude, GPT, or Gemini client to call your tools or read your data without writing a separate integration per LLM. A single MCP server works across every MCP-capable client.
See also
- agent — An LLM-driven program that plans, calls tools, observes results, and loops until it reaches a goal.
- Claude Code — Anthropic's official terminal-based coding agent, with MCP support and a plugin ecosystem.
- n8n — Open-source workflow automation tool with 400+ integrations, self-hostable, fair-code licensed.
Mentioned in
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