Enterprise Weekly #508: Who's Down with MCP?
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Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. In a surprising announcement, OpenAI shared that it will roll out support across its products for Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is rival Anthropic’s open standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives, including content repositories, business tools, and development environments. Since MCP’s launch in November 2024, the protocol has gained momentum with developers and this move by OpenAI is a rare hat-tip between competitors.
MCP is a big step towards an agentic future because it significantly improves our ability to build production-grade agents that can complete complex tasks. The protocol allows agents to maintain memory, handle conversation history, and integrate with external data sources ranging from a company’s database to Slack messages to file systems in a standardized way. As Anthropic puts it, MCP is like a USB-C port for Connecting LLM with Applications 🤓
OpenAI’s embrace of MCP comes at an interesting time. Just last week OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman discussed how the research lab is increasingly operating like a consumer tech company, all while Anthropic aims for the enterprise and their need for AI infrastructure—pushing forward initiatives like MCP, mechanistic interpretability, responsible scaling, partnerships with the likes of Databricks, and more. If this trajectory holds, it will be fascinating to see how these two AI powerhouses collaborate in the coming years.
Still, it’s not just OpenAI taking notice—several major players are already leveraging MCP to power new AI-driven capabilities:
Zapier uses MCP to connect AI assistants to interact with apps like Slack, Notion, and G-suite
Box is building an MCP server capable of interacting with the Box API
Cloudflare is enabling users to build and deploy remote MCP servers to Cloudflare
Even more examples of MCP servers
While it’s still early, Priyanka shared her thoughts on the community's enthusiasm for MCP, practical considerations about implementing it in production, and required next steps for widespread adoption of agents.
If you’re building with MCP, we’d love to hear from you! There is so much potential for enterprise work that can be transformed with MCP agents. We’re actively leading seed rounds in B2B software companies and just invested in a stealth agent builder for regulated industries 🤖
📚 Read more news:
Techcrunch: 11x has been claiming customers it doesn’t have
WSJ: AI Uncertainty Cools Demand for Hotly Anticipated CoreWeave IPO
Bloomberg: Anthropic Signs Deal to Bring Claude to Databricks Platform
Reuters: Microsoft pulls back from more data center leases in US and Europe
📚 Read more (th)reads:
Michaela Lehr on Termination for Convenience and what it means for ARR
Anthropic: on Tracing the thoughts of a large language model
Kyle Poyar on AI startups are killing ARR as we've come to know it
Company: Courier Health
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