Anthropic is releasing what it hopes will be a new standard in data integration for AI. Called the Model Context Protocol (MCP), its goal is to eliminate the need to customize each integration by having code written each time a company’s data is connected to a model. The open-source MCP tool could become a universal way to link data sources to AI. The aim is to have models querying databases directly. MCP is “a new standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives, including content repositories, business tools, and development environments,” according to Anthropic.

The idea, Anthropic details in a blog post, is to help frontier models like its own Claude “produce better, more relevant responses.”

AI assistants are becoming commonplace in corporate environments, where millions of dollars are spent on integration, “yet even the most sophisticated models are constrained by their isolation from data — trapped behind information silos and legacy systems,” Anthropic says, noting “every new data source requires its own custom implementation, making truly connected systems difficult to scale.”

Software like LangChain is designed to help integrate databases, but still require some coding. Anthropic hopes MCP can make it a turnkey process, “replacing fragmented integrations with a single protocol,” making integration easier and “more reliable.”

VentureBeat quotes Alex Albert, head of Claude Relations at Anthropic, saying the company is positioning MCP as a “universal translator” in “a world where AI connects to any data source.”

MCP handles both local resources — which includes company databases, files, services — as well as remote assets, which could be APIs from GitHub, Slack and others. The ability to do that without having to customize each data connection would be a big time saver.

“Integrate MCP once into your client and connect to data sources anywhere,” Albert posted on X.

MCP lets any models, not just Anthropic’s, “draw data from sources like business tools and software to complete tasks, as well as from content repositories and app development environments,” TechCrunch writes.

MCP “enables developers to build secure, two-way connections between their data sources and AI-powered tools,” Anthropic adds. “The architecture is straightforward: developers can either expose their data through MCP servers or build AI applications (MCP clients) that connect to these servers.”

As part of the MCP rollout, Anthropic is not only introducing the MCP specification and SDKs, but also local MCP server support in the Claude Desktop apps and an open-source repository of MCP servers.