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This is a nice 2-minute video overview of this from Matt Pocock (of Typescript fame) https://www.aihero.dev/anthropics-new-model-context-protocol...
His high level summary is that this boils down to a "list tools" RPC call, and a "call tool" RPC call.
It is, indeed, very smart and very simple.
It appears that clients retrieve prompts from a server to hydrate them with context only, to then execute/complete somewhere else (like Claude Desktop, using Anthropic models). The server doesn’t know how effective the prompt will be in the model that the client has access to. It doesn’t even know if the client is a chat app, or Zed code completion.
In the sampling interface - where the flow is inverted, and the server presents a completion request to the client - it can suggest that the client uses some model type /parameters. This makes sense given only the server knows how to do this effectively.
Given the server doesn’t understand the capabilities of the client, why the asymmetry in these related interfaces?
There’s only one server example that uses prompts (fetch), and the one prompt it provides returns the same output as the tool call, except wrapped in a PromptMessage. EDIT: lols like there are some capabilities classes in the mcp, maybe these will evolve.
@jspahrsummers and I have been working on this for the last few months at Anthropic. I am happy to answer any questions people might have.
Superb work and super promising! I had wished for a protocol like this. Is there a recommended resource for building MCP client? From what I've seen it just mentions Claude desktop & co are clients. SDK readme seems to cover it a bit but some examples could be great.
The best starting point are the respective client parts in the SDK: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/typescript-sdk/tree/... and https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk/tree/main..., as well as the official specification documentation at https://spec.modelcontextprotocol.io.
If you run into issues, feel free to open a discussion in the respective SDK repository and we are happy to help.
(I've been fairly successful in taking the spec documentation in markdown, an SDK and giving both to Claude and asking questions, but of course that requires a Claude account, which I don't want to assume)
Is this basically open source data collectors / data integration connectors?
I love how they’re pretending to be champions of open source while leaving this gem in their terms of use “”” You may not access or use, or help another person to access or use, our Services in the following ways: … To develop any products or services that compete with our Services, including to develop or train any artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms or models. “””
If anyone here has an issue with their Claude Desktop app seeing the new MCP tools you've added to your computer, restart it fully. Restarting the Claude Desktop app did NOT work for me, I had to do a full OS restart.
I'm surprised that there doesn't seem to be a concept of payments or monetization baked into the protocol. I believe there are some major companies to be built around making data and API actions available to AI Models, either as an intermediary or marketplace or for service providers or data owners directly- and they'd all benefit from a standardised payment model on a per transaction level.
I see a good number of comments that seem skeptical or confused about what's going on here or what the value is. One thing that some people may not realize is that right now there's a MASSIVE amount of effort duplication around developing something that could maybe end up looking like MCP. Everyone building an LLM agent (or pseudo-agent, or whatever) right now is writing a bunch of boilerplate for mapping between mes…
data security is the reason i'd imagine they're letting other's host servers