Standards usually take a decade. MCP took about a year. If you are betting your business workflows on it, the story is worth knowing — it explains why this one is likely to last.
November 2024: the launch
Anthropic open-sourced the Model Context Protocol on 25 November 2024, with a specification, developer kits, and ready-made servers for everyday tools like Google Drive, Slack and GitHub. The pitch was simple: stop rebuilding the same connection between every AI model and every tool.
2025: the rivals sign up
In March 2025, OpenAI — Anthropic’s biggest competitor — adopted MCP across its platform. Google and Microsoft followed with support in their own agent stacks. When competitors adopt your protocol, it stops being a product feature and becomes infrastructure.
December 2025: neutral ground
Anthropic donated MCP to the new Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation, co-founded with Block and OpenAI and backed by Google, Microsoft, AWS and others. At the handover, the ecosystem already counted more than 10,000 published MCP servers, and the official software kits were being downloaded tens of millions of times a month.
2026: production, not experiments
This year the question in serious teams changed from “should we try MCP?” to “which of our tools still lack a server?” Vendors increasingly ship an MCP server alongside their normal API — because that is how agents, and increasingly customers, arrive.
For a freelancer or small business, the takeaway is practical: connections you set up today sit on a standard governed by a foundation, supported by every major platform, and used by thousands of tools. It is about as safe a bet as new technology gets.
Sources: Anthropic’s MCP announcement (Nov 2024) and the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation announcement (Dec 2025). Repurposed and simplified here for our readers.