MCP: the details
Anthropic introduced it in November 2024, and since December 2025 it has been maintained by the Agentic AI Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. It works with two pieces: an MCP server, which exposes what a system can do, and a client, which is the AI application using it. The server offers tools (actions the model can request), resources (data it can read) and prompt templates.
The practical advantage is that the integration is written once. An MCP server for your ERP works the same for Claude, for ChatGPT or for an agent of your own, and switching models doesn’t mean rebuilding it. The protocol doesn’t solve security by itself, starting with prompt injection: what each tool may do, with which credential and on which data is still a decision for whoever deploys it.