Skip to content
forward pass

The Model Context Protocol

Anthropic publishes an open standard for connecting models to tools and data, a USB for AI; within a year it is adopted by every major laboratory and donated to a foundation.

category
product
significance
3 of 5
people
David Soria Parra, Justin Spahr-Summers
organisations
Anthropic

what had to happen · 55 events back to 1943

Every event this one built on, transitively, in order. The organism has the same path lit. Direct influences are marked.

00 · One neuron · 1

  1. 1943A logical calculus of nervous activity

I · Foundations · 9

  1. 1948A mathematical theory of communication
  2. 1949Cells that fire together wire together
  3. 1950Programming a computer for playing chess
  4. 1958The perceptron learns
  5. 1959Samuel's checkers program coins 'machine learning'
  6. 1960ADALINE and the least-mean-squares rule
  7. 1965Moore's law
  8. 1969Perceptrons
  9. 1970Reverse-mode automatic differentiation

W1 · The first winter · 2

  1. 1974Werbos applies backpropagation to neural networks
  2. 1980The Neocognitron

II · Connection · 3

  1. 1982The Hopfield network
  2. 1985The Boltzmann machine
  3. 1986Backpropagation

W2 · The second winter · 6

  1. 1988Temporal-difference learning
  2. 1989Q-learning
  3. 1989LeNet reads handwritten postcodes
  4. 1990Finding structure in time
  5. 1991The vanishing gradient problem
  6. 1992TD-Gammon reaches world-class backgammon

III · Statistics and data · 10

  1. 1997Long short-term memory
  2. 1998MNIST and LeNet-5
  3. 1999The first GPU
  4. 2003A neural probabilistic language model
  5. 2006Deep belief networks and the word 'deep'
  6. 2007CUDA
  7. 2009Deep learning moves to GPUs
  8. 2009ImageNet
  9. 2010Rectified linear units
  10. 2010DeepMind is founded

IV · Deep learning · 11

  1. 2012Google Brain's network discovers cats
  2. 2012Dropout
  3. 2012AlexNet wins ImageNet
  4. 2013Deep Q-networks play Atari
  5. 2014Google buys DeepMind
  6. 2014Superintelligence
  7. 2014Attention
  8. 2014Sequence to sequence learning
  9. 2015Batch normalisation
  10. 2015Residual networks
  11. 2015OpenAI is founded

V · Transformers · 9

  1. 2017Attention is all you need
  2. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences
  3. 2018GPT: generative pre-training
  4. 2019GPT-2 and the model too dangerous to release
  5. 2020Scaling laws for neural language models
  6. 2020GPT-3
  7. 2020Learning to summarise from human feedback
  8. 2021Anthropic is founded
  9. 2021GitHub Copilot writes code

VI · Everyone · 4

  1. 2022InstructGPT
  2. 2023Claude
  3. 2024Claude 3 catches GPT-4
  4. 2024Claude learns to use a computerdirect

Every assistant that wanted to read a database, search a codebase or call a service had, until late 2024, needed a custom integration for each one, written against each model's tool-calling format. The Model Context Protocol, published by Anthropic on 25 November 2024 as an open specification with reference servers, defined one interface: a server exposes tools, resources and prompts; a client, the model's host application, discovers and calls them. Write a server once and any compliant model can use it.

It was released quietly and became, within months, the thing agents were built on. OpenAI adopted it in March 2025, Google and Microsoft followed, and the editors and coding tools of 2025 shipped with it. By December 2025 there were more than ten thousand public servers, and Anthropic donated the protocol to a new Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, co-founded with OpenAI and Block, so that no single laboratory owned it.

MCP is on this timeline as the plumbing of the agent era, in the way MapReduce was the plumbing of the data era. This site runs an MCP server so that agents can read the timeline the way people do.

what it led to · 1 events downstream, through 2025

Built on it directly:

  1. 2025MCP is donated to the Agentic AI FoundationVII

sources · 2

Trace the lineage of this event on the timeline →Back to the ledger