The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open-standard framework developed by Anthropic (launched in November 2024) to streamline how AI systems – especially large language models – integrate with external tools, applications, and data sources. It provides a unified API over JSON-RPC 2.0 for operations such as reading files, calling functions, and managing contextual data, enabling AI agents to interact with diverse environments without custom integration for each tool. MCP has quickly gained adoption by major players like OpenAI and Google DeepMind, positioning itself as a foundational standard for AI interoperability and context-aware tool use.