Today’s guests, David Soria Parra and Justin Spahr-Summers, are the creators of Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP). When we first wrote Why MCP Won, we had no idea how quickly it was about to win.

In the past 4 weeks, OpenAI and now Google have now announced the MCP support, effectively confirming our prediction that MCP was the presumptive winner of the agent standard wars. MCP has now overtaken OpenAPI, the incumbent option and most direct alternative, in GitHub stars (3 months ahead of conservative trendline):

For protocol and history nerds, we also asked David and Justin to tell the origin story of MCP, which we leave to the reader to enjoy (you can also skim the transcripts, or, the changelogs of a certain favored IDE). It’s incredible the impact that individual engineers solving their own problems can have on an entire industry.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

00:37 What is MCP?

02:00 The Origin Story of MCP

05:18 Development Challenges and Solutions

08:06 Technical Details and Inspirations

29:45 MCP vs Open API

32:48 Building MCP Servers

40:39 Exploring Model Independence in LLMs

41:36 Building Richer Systems with MCP

43:13 Understanding Agents in MCP

45:45 Nesting and Tool Confusion in MCP

49:11 Client Control and Tool Invocation

52:08 Authorization and Trust in MCP Servers

01:01:34 Future Roadmap and Stateless Servers

01:10:07 Open Source Governance and Community Involvement

01:18:12 Wishlist and Closing Remarks