🌱 MPC (Model Context Protocol)

The MCP (Model Context Protocol) is one attempt, and currently the most recognised, at creating a standard for communication between technologies. It is an open standard and open source framework, developed and introduced by Anthropic in November 2024. A rival AI-centric protocol is Google's Agent-to-Agent (🌱 A2A) protocol.

MCP provides a standardised way for models to interact with existing data sources, such as databases or existing APIs.

The general architecture of MCP is a client-server model with information exchanged using JSON-RPC carried over Stdio, HTTP or SSE, as appropriate for the specific use case

• The AI model (the "host") makes requests for data or actions.
• The MCP client (embedded in the AI or its platform) manages communication.
• The MCP server acts as a bridge to external data sources (APIs, files, databases, etc.), retrieving information or performing actions as requested
  
  source

The main objective of MCP is to provide a protocol to standardise how models and tools expose their capabilities, thus facilitating communication, hence its comparison the the USB-C standard. Note, this is not the only way of facilitating communication between models - the referenced article provides a link to a previous exploration of other ways of doing this, such as LangChain.

Source: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/12/ai_agent_protocols_mcp_a2a/

The Register has undertaken some experimenting with setting up a MCP which is interesting reading: https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/21/mcp_guide/

MCP for n8n & Claude

Build and Ship Any MCP Server in MINUTES (Full Guide)