MCP was created by Anthropic in November 2024 as an open standard for connecting LLMs to external tools, data, and services; governance was later handed to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, co-founded by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Block. A useful mental model: MCP is USB-C for AI — a universal plug that lets any client connect to any tool server, regardless of who built either side.

MCP sits between the LLM's reasoning loop and the actual execution of tools and resources — it's the interface layer, not the reasoning itself. Handing governance to a vendor-neutral foundation, rather than keeping it Anthropic-only, is what let competing labs adopt it as shared infrastructure, similar to how HTTP or Kafka became standards nobody owns outright.