Understand what MCP connects

MCP gives AI applications and external systems a common way to communicate. Anthropic introduced the Model Context Protocol on November 25, 2024, to reduce the custom integrations needed for each data source. ^[1]

On December 9, 2025, Anthropic announced its donation to the Agentic AI Foundation, a Linux Foundation fund co-founded with Block and OpenAI. ^[2]

Follow one connection

The protocol's architecture uses three participants. The host is your AI application. It creates an MCP client to connect to a server, which exposes capabilities such as tools and resources. A host can maintain several of these client connections. ^[3]

For example, a database server can expose a query tool and a resource describing the schema. MCP defines how the application discovers and calls those capabilities. ^[3]

Check the server before enabling it

I would check who operates the server, what credentials it needs and which actions it exposes. Give a read-only task read-only access where the service supports that restriction. A common protocol does not establish that a particular server deserves your credentials.

The architecture documentation also distinguishes local STDIO connections from remote Streamable HTTP connections. Check which transport your application supports before copying a server configuration. ^[3]