What does MCP mean?

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol.

The protocol was announced in late 2024 and is still pretty new, but it’s quickly becoming the standard way to extend AI assistants with capabilities beyond what they can do out of the box.

It’s a standard created by Anthropic that lets AI assistants like Claude connect to things like your database, your Google Drive, or your company’s APIs. Developers build “MCP servers” that expose their data or functionality in a standard way. Then any MCP-compatible AI can use them. For example, you might have an MCP server for your database, another for Slack, another for GitHub, and another for your internal APIs.

Anyone can build an MCP server. Anthropic provides some official ones, but the community is building lots of custom servers for databases, Slack integration, GitHub access, and specialized business tools.

If you’re using Claude Code, you can configure MCP servers in your settings to give Claude access to additional context and capabilities.