In short
Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast - Episode Summary
Episode Title
One Year of MCP
Guests
- David Soria Parra (MCP Lead, Anthropic)
- Nick Cooper (OpenAI)
- Brad Howes (Block/Goose)
- Jim Zemlin (Linux Foundation CEO)
Episode Overview This episode marks the one-year anniversary of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), initiated by Anthropic. MCP has rapidly evolved into a widely adopted standard for agentic systems, utilized by major players such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The discussion centers around the journey, development, and impact of MCP, alongside the formation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation. The podcast delves deep into the technical evolution of MCP, its applications in enterprises, authentication challenges, and future directions.
Key Takeaways
- The Journey of MCP
- Launch & Adoption: MCP was launched a year ago and has since gained traction across major enterprises, transforming from a local tool to a standard protocol.
- Key Milestones:
- Early adoption began during Thanksgiving and Christmas.
- Significant industry recognition came in April from leaders at Microsoft and Google.
- Protocol Development
- MCP started as a local-only protocol and evolved to support remote HTTP streaming and OAuth 2.1 authentication.
- Emphasis on creating a robust protocol for both simple tool calls and complex multi-agent communication.
- Authentication Challenges
- Initial flaws in the authentication spec led to a reassessment and improvement in June.
- Separation of resource servers from identity providers became essential for enterprise readiness.
- Internal Adoption in Enterprises
- Many enterprises are utilizing invisible MCP servers to connect internal agents to various tools (e.g., Slack, proprietary data).
- Significant traction in compliance-heavy industries like finance and healthcare.
- MCP Apps and UI
- Introduction of MCP Apps, which utilize iframes for richer user interfaces beyond text inputs.
- Collaborative efforts with OpenAI to establish a common standard for UI representation.
- Registry and Community Building
- The need for a structured registry for MCP to enable model-driven discovery and enhance trust among users.
- Encouragement for developers to build and contribute to the MCP ecosystem, with a focus on high-quality, well-maintained projects.
- Future Vision for MCP
- Aiming for MCP to act as the communication layer for asynchronous, long-running agents.
- Development of an ecosystem where agents can efficiently discover and install their own tools.
- Formation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)
- The foundation aims to provide a neutral home for collaborative advancement in AI technologies.
- Competitive AI labs came together to establish AAIF, promoting openness and community-driven development.
Topics Discussed
- Evolution of MCP from a concept to an industry standard.
- Technical specifications and improvements in authentication.
- Challenges and successes encountered during the first year of implementation.
- Role of community and collaborative efforts in the open-source landscape.
- Future of agentic systems and their integration into various industries.
Conclusion The episode encapsulates the rapid developments within the MCP framework over the past year, highlighting the importance of collaboration, community involvement, and innovative problem-solving in the evolving AI landscape. The formation of AAIF signifies a commitment to maintaining an open and collaborative environment for all stakeholders in the AI ecosystem.
For more insights, visit the [Latent Space website](https://latent.space).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VORecap of MCP's One-Year Journey
0:46 to 1:30
Discussion on the one-year anniversary of MCP and recent events.
“I would say in terms of my food bench Anthropic does rank over OpenAI.”
MCP's Growth and Adoption
1:31 to 3:35
Overview of MCP's adoption and major milestones in the past year.
“and like adoption, you know, through initially through like Thanksgiving and Christmas very early with a lot of like builders building MCP.”
Technical Developments in MCP
3:36 to 6:00
Insights into the technical improvements and updates made to MCP over the year.
“I mean, I think it was just obvious that it was going to happen.”
Authentication Challenges and Solutions
6:01 to 8:10
In-depth discussion on the challenges of authentication within MCP and how they were addressed.
“as the lead core maintainer of like shepherding the process that is shepherding the protocol forward.”
Streamable HTTP Protocol Evolution
8:11 to 10:35
Exploration of the evolution and challenges of the streamable HTTP protocol in MCP.
“How do we build a protocol that has these streaming properties that we require?”
Lessons Learned from MCP Development
10:36 to 14:01
Reflection on lessons learned during the development of MCP, focusing on server communication.
“which we like, and that was that authentication spec, the first iteration, then fixing it in June.”
Challenges of Scaling MCP
14:01 to 15:10
Learn about the complexities of scaling Multi-Client Protocol (MCP) across multiple servers.
“And we know from like some companies like the Googles of the world, the Microsofts of the world, they're doing MCP at a scale that I can't tell you the numbers but it's like in the million of requests.”
Consensus in Engineering Meetings
15:10 to 17:02
Understand the dynamics of decision-making in high-level engineering discussions with multiple stakeholders.
“really bi-directional streaming if you need it, but also make it scalable.”
Comparing IETF and MCP Standards
17:02 to 17:58
Explore the differences between the IETF standards process and the more agile approach taken by MCP.
“So I'm very grateful to be in this situation.”
Influence of Model Improvements on Protocol Design
17:58 to 19:15
Discover how model enhancements impact protocol design in the context of AI.
“How do you balance the influence of like the model improvements with how to shape the protocol?”
Show all 44 chapters
Progressive Discovery in MCP
19:15 to 21:09
Learn about the principle of progressive discovery and its application in the MCP context.
“But I think the primitives of the protocol, they're actually very rarely influenced by model improvements.”
MCP Versus Skills: Understanding the Differences
21:09 to 23:09
Understand the distinct roles of MCP and skills in AI applications and their complementary nature.
“But yeah, but like people call it, we call it pre-grammatic MCP and other call it code mode.”
MCP as a Connectivity Layer
23:09 to 26:15
Explore how MCP functions as a communication layer for AI applications and skills.
“I see it purely as an optimization, honestly, the token optimization.”
Real-World Applications of MCP at Anthropic
26:15 to 28:00
Learn how Anthropic uses MCP in various internal applications and deployments.
“But I think both works at the end of the day.”
Origin Story of MCP
28:00 to 28:38
Learn how the MCP was conceived to empower developers in a growing company.
“about the company, about the future, about AI, about safety, these type of things.”
Building Self-Managed MCP Servers
28:38 to 30:01
Discover how users are creating their own MCP servers for internal needs.
“It's like people build MCP servers for themselves.”
Registry Launch and Its Challenges
30:01 to 31:06
Explore the launch of the MCP registry and the complexities it introduces.
“because people will take that and actually put this into their companies.”
Standardizing MCP Registries
31:06 to 32:51
Understand the need for a central MCP registry and its implications.
“like, you know, Smithery is one example, right?”
Trust and Security in Registries
32:51 to 34:23
Delve into the importance of trust levels and security measures for registries.
“Like the GitHub registry is curated after or speaks the same format as the official registry.”
Insights from Community Events
34:23 to 36:54
Gain insights from community events and the lessons learned from attendees.
“You want to do it against a curated, trusted registry.”
Challenges in Sampling Use Cases
36:54 to 39:36
Discuss the challenges and developments in sampling use cases for MCP.
“And there you see some of the struggles, but you see also some of the success stories.”
Evolving Use Cases for MCP
39:36 to 42:00
Examine the evolving use cases for MCP beyond data consumption.
“Like when you want to do something, you want to have a set of new tools that you only want to use during that sample call.”
Understanding MCP and Task Design
42:00 to 43:58
Explore the design principles behind MCP and the importance of long-running tasks in AI applications.
“or what we're going to call MCPI in the future.”
Optimizing Long-Running Operations
43:58 to 46:28
Learn about the challenges of managing long-running tasks and the proposed solutions for task completion notifications.
“And a pure asynchronous tool call would just not do this.”
Context Management in AI Applications
46:28 to 50:11
Discuss the importance of context retention and management for AI agents and the evolving techniques for handling context.
“But the actual core interface is always that the client can pull.”
MCP for Developers vs. Consumers
50:11 to 52:39
Differentiate the roles of developers and consumers in utilizing MCP for building AI applications and integrating services.
“Around MCPs, another question I had is like, how do you see them as being used by developers to build AI apps versus being a protocol for AI consumers to plug things in?”
User Interfaces and MCP Integration
52:39 to 55:48
Examine the role of user interfaces in enhancing the MCP experience and the challenges of maintaining consistency across applications.
“but then if I go in ChatGPT, there's like a different version that they curated.”
Exploring MCPUI: Frontend and Backend Dynamics
56:00 to 58:10
Learn about the evolution and implications of MCPUI in applications.
“You should probably not have external references.”
MCP's Future in Financial Services and Healthcare
58:10 to 1:01:10
Understand the potential extensions of MCP in sensitive data sectors.
“And only then the server allows connections because it knows they are respecting attributions, these daily contracts that you put into place.”
Commitment to Open Standards and Community Involvement
1:01:10 to 1:03:28
Discover the ongoing commitment to open standards and community engagement in MCP's evolution.
“They're like, oh, is this Enthopic taking its eye off the ball?”
Joining Forces: The Role of the Linux Foundation
1:03:28 to 1:10:02
Learn why the Linux Foundation is a pivotal element for the future of MCP and its collaborative projects.
“And we're here in the studio with core team members of AAF.”
Governance and Technical Contributions in AI
1:10:02 to 1:10:34
Learn about the governance structure and support for technical contributions at the Linux Foundation.
Engagement and Practical Applications of Goose
1:10:34 to 1:12:45
Discover the practical applications of Goose and its relationship with MCP.
“and work out how to bring it all together.”
Developing Standards Through Collaboration
1:12:45 to 1:14:57
Understand how collaboration fosters the development of new standards in AI.
“is like Goose was the first open source agent interface or agent that reached out to us and worked with us to integrate MCP.”
The Need for Open Standards and Feedback
1:14:57 to 1:17:06
Explore the importance of open standards and community feedback in AI development.
“I mean, I think the world of standards and open source development are just merging, right?”
Balancing Innovation and Curation in AI Projects
1:17:06 to 1:19:09
Learn about the challenges of balancing innovation and curation in AI projects.
“Is there a roadmap for what you want to add?”
Incentives for Contributing to the Foundation
1:19:09 to 1:22:13
Discuss the incentives for donating projects to the Agentic AI Foundation.
“innovation by saying like, oh, well, this is the one versus that one.”
The Value of Collaboration in AI Development
1:22:13 to 1:24:00
Discover the value of collaboration and communication in AI project development.
“that market feedback then allows companies to make money off of them.”
The Evolution of AI Foundations
1:24:00 to 1:25:50
Discussing the rationale behind establishing a new AI foundation and its unique focus.
“LF has many other funds and, and, and organizations including data, data and AI foundation as well as like dedicated like PyTorch and all the other ones.”
Resource Allocation and Responsibilities
1:25:50 to 1:27:50
Exploring how resources are allocated within the foundation and its operational responsibilities.
“I mean, sometimes stuff comes in over time and we sort things out later.”
Directed Funds and Community Involvement
1:27:50 to 1:30:50
Understanding how directed funds work and their role in fostering community contributions.
“I mean, 50 companies coming in to fund a bunch of blog posts seems like overkill.”
The Future of the Foundation and Industry Impact
1:30:50 to 1:35:00
Anticipating the foundational developments and their implications in the tech industry.
“That's where the funding goes for these kind of things.”
Excitement for Upcoming Developments
1:35:00 to 1:38:00
Expressing enthusiasm for future contributions and the evolution of agent technology.
“So I don't really know what it's going to be looking like, but I really look forward to like the next step.”
Looking Forward to Impactful Success Stories
1:38:00 to 1:39:01
Listeners will learn about anticipated success stories from organizations using agentic technology.
“I think what I look forward to is, you know, the success stories of, you know, the organization that's implemented agentic technology in that way and hearing how it really impacted their business.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:06Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Layden Space Podcast. This is Alasio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by SWIX, editor of Blade & Space. Hey, and here we are joined, finally in the studio, for the first time. Welcome back, David, from Anthropics slash MCP. Yeah, hey, well, nice to finally talk to you in Perth. And last time, like a year ago, it was over VC, and this is way fun. I watched it back, it was eight months. It's been a crazy eight months, and I think we just celebrated like the one-year anniversary of MCP. Yes, we did. At least the public announcement. and also last night or yesterday was the Agentic AI foundation launch.
0:42Yeah, that was nice. It was a nice event. It was nice to see the Anthropic office and not been. You like it? Yeah. It's very good food. I would say in terms of my food bench Anthropic does rank over OpenAI. Yeah. At least that's what we have going for us. Awesome, man. Do you want to give just a quick overview of what's happening with MCPA and how you're donating it to the foundation and then we'll do kind of like a one-year recap of the protocol itself. And then we'll have the rest of the leads from the foundation join us to do more of the high level. Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, I mean, where we're at at the moment, we have done like a year, like a year ago we launched it and then we had this like crazy adoption over the last year now, which it feels like an eternity, honestly.
1:28But we have this like crazy growth and like adoption, you know, through initially through like Thanksgiving and Christmas very early with a lot of like builders building MCP. And then, you know, you had like the first big clients coming in like Cursor and VS Code. And then like you had this like inflection point around April with like Sam Altman and Satya and Sundar and all posting about like MCP and that they're going to adopt MCP at Microsoft, at Google, at OpenAI. And that was really like the big inflection point. But in all of the time, you also had to do a lot of work on the protocol itself.
2:07We launched originally as basically local only. We could build local MCP servers for Cloud Desktop. But then in March this year, we moved into how can you do remote MCP servers to connect to a remote server and introduced the first iteration of authentication. And then in June, we revisited that and improved it quite a little bit so that it works better for, you know, for enterprises in particularly. And we were very, very lucky that in that time for March, like June, we were like able to like have absolute industry leading experts that literally work on OAuth itself to help us with some of the pieces, right?
2:48And how to get it right. And then we focused a lot of on like security best practices and this type of work. And now we like, I feel we have a really solid foundation and we're doing, we just launched like in our end of like November, then the recent iteration of the protocol, finally like the next bigger improvement to the protocol, which is like long running tasks to really allow for like, you know, deep research type of task and like, you know, maybe even agent to agent communication. And so I think we're just stepping into like this territory now with like, okay, we have really solid foundations.
3:22We have like one more big primitive we want to add. We want to make like a little bit more scalability. things work and then we're you know gonna get into a phase where it probably becomes a bit more stable and so yeah it's been an absolutely crazy year man you did say the agent to agent so there is an A2A protocol I'm curious when the Agentica Engineering Foundation got formed or just Agentica Foundation was there any discussion about any of these other protocols being a part of it or you know Sean wrote a post called YMCP1 already so one of my favorite posts of the year was already And it was before Sev and all the other guys.
4:00Yeah, you were right. I mean, I think it was just obvious that it was going to happen. Yeah. So we of course have conversations around what else is in the market, like the payment protocols that are interesting and so on. But when we wanted to start a foundation, we wanted to make sure, first of all, two things. We wanted to start small and make sure that the group that is founding this, for us, it's the first time we at Anthropic have an open source foundation, so this is all new to us. We really want to start it small and making sure we're learning along the ways and being able to shepherd this in the way we feel is best for the industry together with OpenAI and Block.
4:38But the second part of that is also we really felt like we wanted to see things that have a lot of adoption or de-factor-like, at least on the protocol side, like a de-factor standard. and I don't think any of the other protocols, it feels like they're not just there yet. But of course, if they get there, then we're like super open as long as they're like complementary to what's in the foundation. On the application side, we're a little bit more flexible and we're like more open. But on the protocol side, I think we really want to make sure that we're not like offering like, the foundation doesn't encompass like five protocols for the same like communication there.
5:16And so, yeah, there was discussion, but I think for now, we just want to start it small. Is there a role, like a double head that you have now with the foundation? Or are you more focused on MCP? I am still mostly focused on MCP. It's a bit of a double head. So there is just like, I think people need to understand like the foundation part is mostly just an umbrella to make sure the projects under it stay always neutral. And I think that's really the most important part you want to get a lot, you know, want to understand because the rest of it is like, okay, how do we use the budget of the foundation for events and things that are like quite dry.
5:52And then the technical parts to like MCP, they stay actually the same. Like on the way we govern MCP, nothing has really changed. And so that's really still my job as the lead core maintainer of like shepherding the process that is shepherding the protocol forward. And then beyond that, now the additional double role is like, I'm also going to be on the technical steering committee of the foundation, which will like make sure to like figure out what are the projects we want to have in the foundation so if someone comes with a project to us the people that have projects in it will decide is this something we would want is this something that we feel is like well maintained has a lot of adoption it's not going to go away we want to make sure the foundation is have like super interesting and important projects and not like a dumping ground like have you know some foundations might have ended up with that's true uh so we're going to meet some of the others later but maybe we'll just focus back on the sort of mcp development yeah you covered a lot there's been four spec releases that's a lot yeah so people may have missed some of them that's what i'm saying right like and i think it's really interesting how uh you're we've continued to work on like really important parts like i always think like it's very hard to follow up a major success with a sequel because the sequel usually like is it's hard to repeat yeah that uh impact but i think like every single time you've actually managed to focus on something important.
7:15Maybe we can cover, I guess, maybe we'll start with the March-May one, which is HTTP streaming, which is good, and the off-spec. Any other, I don't know if you want to highlight any others, but we'll just catch people up on that stuff. Yeah, I think that was such an important one. It was the number one requested thing. Yeah, it really opened up this remote thing, and we already knew, actually, in December and November, that the next big thing will be like how can you do this over remote? Authentication is quite important. One of the things I think people very rarely notice when it comes to MCP, MCP is very prescriptive in each layer.
7:56Other protocols are not like that, for example. We like, you want to do authentication. If the client and the server don't know each other, you need to do OR, right? And so we were very early, we wanted to have one way to do something. And so we really focused on what does this mean? Like how do we get it over? How do we build a protocol that has these streaming properties that we require? And then how do we do authentication very early? Authentication, in the first iteration, I think we did an okay job, but we got some aspects wrong. And most of them, honestly, were just me not understanding enterprises well enough.
8:28But then again, I think the strengths that we have with MCP, and I think the one thing, if anything, I'm proud of is like building a community of people that can come together and help me figure shit out. because I have my set of experiences of what I'm good at. And enterprise authentication, it turns out, is not one of them, right? But they're way better suited people for that. And so that's when we like, after that march. I saw you post that, but I didn't really dig into the details. Was it like the typical SAML type of authentication issue? The main issue we did is, in OAuth, there are two components.
9:05There's an authentication server who gives you the token. and then there's the resource server. It takes the token and gives you the resource in return. And in the first iteration of our authentication spec, we combined them together into the MCP server, which if you were building... Unusable, yeah. It's kind of usable if you build like an MCP server like as like a public server as a, you know, you're a startup, you're building a server for yourself. You want to bind this to the accounts you already have. That is completely usable. The reality in enterprises is you don't authentic, you authenticate with some central entity.
9:40Like, you know, you have some IDP provider, an IDP, and you go off to NL0. Yeah. For most people, they don't even notice that it's happening. All they know is like, oh, in the morning, I'm going to go log in with Google and then get access to all my work stuff, right? But that's effectively the IDP, right? And if you combine these into the same server, you just can't do this anymore. And so all we needed to do is like, okay, we are a resource server the MCP server is a resource server how you get the token from the authentication server we have opinions on how you should do it but it's kind of separated and that's what happened then in the June spec where we separated this out and worked through a lot of these like okay, now how do you do dynamic client registration and other aspects which also were part of the March spec we can talk about that that's a whole other story of like we are actually pushing the boundaries of what OAuth can do with MCP because we're trying something very unique with MCP.
10:35But yeah, that was the big part in March, which we like, and that was that authentication spec, the first iteration, then fixing it in June. What's the state of agents authenticating on my behalf? Because even today with the OAuth, I still have to, you know, log into linear and whatnot. OAuth itself is for the most part a very human-centric protocol. It just tells you how you obtain a token if you don't have a token. Once you have a token, actually it doesn't matter. You just put it into the Barrow token. And so we're not very prescriptive of what like agent to agent authentication would look like or on behalf of agents.
11:10They are ideas that we're looking into and I don't have all the specifics, but we are not prescriptive in the same way we're prescriptive as with OAuth, but you can technically, as a moment here you have a token that might be like bound to like a workload identity or something like that, then you just can pass that still to the MCP server. We're just not telling you how to obtain it just yet. and so we're not prescriptive. And so people do this and they can do it particularly when they're within like an enterprise and have a somewhat closed ecosystem. But if the client and the server don't know each other, we just don't have a good solution for now.
11:42And then on the remote thing, you went from local servers like SSC and then streamable HTTP. Any learnings you want to call out there? Any regrets or learnings for others? And transport. The one discussion has never stopped from the very beginning of the last years about transport. And we literally just spent the last two days at the Google offices with a bunch of like scene engineers from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Anthropic, OpenAI. Just like, what do we need to do here to really, really make this solid? When we looked into Mark, we wanted to get a transport going that basically retains a lot of the properties we had from standard IO.
12:21because you really, and I still believe this until today, that MCP should also enable agents and agents are inherently somewhat stateful and there's some form of like long-term communication going between like the client and the server. And so we always looked for something like that. We also knew that we looked into alternatives, like, okay, what happens if we do WebSockets, for example? And we have found a lot of issues with doing a proper bidirectional stream. And we were like, okay, what is the right middle ground between having something that can be used in the simplest form that people do, like where they just want to provide a tool, but then is able to be upgraded to like a full bidirectional stream if you need it because you really have like complex agents communicating with each other.
13:05That's where streamable HTTP was born with that intent. And I think there's something that in retrospect that we got right and something that we got wrong. I think we got right that we are really leaning just on standard HTTP in that regard. we get wrong that we made a lot of things optional for the clients to do. Like you can, the client can connect and open this return stream from the server, but it doesn't have to. And the reality is, no client does it because it's optional. And so a lot of the bidirectionality goes away. And so features like elicitations and sampling are just not available to servers because they don't have that stream open because the client implementer was like, ah, that's the minimal viable project for me.
13:47I don't have to do it. And so that became an issue. So I think there are lessons there. The second part of the lesson is that the way we designed the protocol, the transfer protocol, requires some form of holding state on the server side. And that is fine if you have one server, but the moment you scale this horizontally across multiple pods and like in containers or something like that, well now if you get like true call and then an elicitation and the elicitation result, you somehow require to like you might hit two different servers and you need to find a way to have these two servers somehow get this result together and you effectively need some form of shared like the Redis, Memcache, whatever you want like some form usually pops up or something like that to have like a shared state that you can like have and that's kind of okay and like we have seen this in PHP application and Python application being done but it's not fun if you do this at scale.
14:46And we know from like some companies like the Googles of the world, the Microsofts of the world, they're doing MCP at a scale that I can't tell you the numbers but it's like in the million of requests. And so now it becomes a problem, right? And so now we're sitting here like, okay, how do you build an iteration of the protocol that allows for basically these principles of like making as simple as possible for simple MCP servers but allow this full spectrum of like really bi-directional streaming if you need it, but also make it scalable. And I think we're just allowed to find the right solutions, but it's just complicated, yeah.
15:20Because a lot of the technology today is really just, there's very little like that. People either do the simple thing and then you do like something like REST or you do like a full bi-directional stream and then you're just going to do like WebSockets or like gRPC and so on. And we need kind of both. What's it like to be in that kind of meeting where you have all these impressive companies and everyone is senior and everyone has an opinion. That's much fun. Get to work with some of the best engineers in the industry. It's insane. Okay, well, who decides? We're trying to get to consensus. The reality is technically I decide in the end of the day, but I think that's more like a formalism.
16:01In the end of the day, what you're trying to do is just to really narrow down of like what are the real problems which we all agree on? What are the things where we not necessarily agree on? And what are the, you know, and then within those bounds, like the best solution. And it takes a while. It takes a lot of iterations. But it's so much, honestly, it's so much fun because you get to see these unique problems from the companies. You see some of the identity of the companies in the problems themselves, right? Like, you know, Google has a different set of problems like Microsoft and a lot of it comes from just the ways of building things and then the problem from Anthropic look different from the problem from OpenAI but what I love about all of this is that everybody is that like sometimes you step back and like you sit in a room with all these competitive companies but you're actually building something together and I love that I've been in open source for like 25 years yeah it's very a lot of this kind of stuff and when a standard works this is the ideal and these people are all amazing I just learn from from all my peers so much.
17:03So I'm very grateful to be in this situation. This reminds me of the IETF standards process. Is there some discussion about how this works as a private group versus something more traditional? It's an interesting one. Like it does look a little bit like the IETF. The IETF is very, slightly different. The IETF is like an open forum where everybody can go. And the result of that, it's like the IETF is very consensus-based and by accident, not by like, Not necessarily because they want to be, but by accident quite slow in the processes, which is very good in many ways. It cannot be undone, right?
17:38Right. Once it's up. Yeah. And like, for example, when you look at like the OS 2.1 spec, it's been in the works for like three years or four years and they're just not done with it, right? And that's like, that's the length of which ITF standardization works. Like these things can take a long, long time. And I think that's good for certain pieces, but I think in AI at the moment, it's just so fast moving. you just you're somewhat forced to find a smaller group and so that's why we run mcp as like a really traditional open source um project with like a core maintainer group of like eight people that basically decide everything and then like input from everybody else like we get input and people can make suggestions and we have a lot of the changes don't come from the core maintainers but they're the ones that decided and that's like way more it's like a middle ground of being somewhat consensus-based, but also somewhat like a bit of a dictatorship, which can be good if you want to move fast, which NCP wants to do at the moment.
18:30How do you balance the influence of like the model improvements with how to shape the protocol? Because obviously, you know, you have Anthropic and OpenAI, you guys are doing post-training on these models to make them better tool calling and you have preferences on the shape of the protocol versus there's people that are not aware of like how you're structuring that. So yeah, do you like share some of these? Like does the protocol influence some of the model post-training or like vice versa maybe i'm not 100 familiar like i'm i'm a product person i'm not fully familiar with everything we do on the research side for sure but it influences the post-training in the sense that we're making use of things like the mcp atlas that we are like having in our model card of like making sure that like we're taking this large set of tools in the wild and make sure that our models work with that.
19:20But I think the primitives of the protocol, they're actually very rarely influenced by model improvements. I think there's a sense that we do anticipate the exponential that the models are on in terms of like improvement and that we're relying to some degree of mechanics that you can't put into the model training. I'm going to get more concrete here. So for example, people have had long conversations around context build of MCP servers. And that happens because MCP opens up the door to a lot of tools. And if you naively take all the tools or throw them into the context window, you just get a lot of bloat.
19:57It would be the equivalent if you take all the skills, take all the mockdown files and just throw them all into the context, you would also have a lot of bloat. But we already knew, and I think we always knew that you can do something like progressive discovery. And that's like a general principle thing of like, you can give the model some information, let the model then decide to gain more information, right? And of course, here is where we're like, you know, some of the foresight that we see because we are the big model companies, we know that we can train this if you wanted to. And what the training does is just optimizes it.
20:32The model can do it in principle already, right? And it can, any model can do it. It does any type of tool calling. But if you train the model for it, it's just better at it, right? And so these things then go hand in hand in a way. But in the end of the day, the general mechanic of progressive discovery, that's just inherent to any type of model that can do any type of tool calling in the end of the day, if that makes sense. Yeah, and I think the context fraud point is important. And I think down there's the MCP versus code mode. And then it's like, well, if Anthropic says code mode and Anthropic made MCP, maybe is that the best way to...
21:07So the block was never actually called it code mode. That's the call fair term. That's it. But yeah, but like people call it, we call it pre-grammatic MCP and other call it code mode. And at the end of the day, what it boils down to is just like, okay, and here's the interesting part. So first of all, MCP is a protocol between the AI application and like servers, right? So the model is actually technically not involved in MCP. And so now you have an application go like, I have a bunch of tools. What can I do with it? And you can do the naive thing and go like, okay, I have tools. I'll throw them into tools for the model and I call them but you can be more creative with it you can go and like okay models are really good at writing code what if I take this and treat it like just like API calls and you give it to the model and now the model generates you know code and what you're effectively doing is this composability that the model would have done anyway by like call tool A you know get the result go back to inference to call B B and then combine it into call 3.
22:06Now all you've done is you let the model optimize it in advance and put them into a bunch of code that is just executed in a sandbox and go like call 1, put it into 2, put the results into 3, get a result. And all you've done is an optimization at the end of the day. But the benefits of MCP, of having authentication done for you, having something that is suited for the LLM, something that is automatically, that is discoverable and self-documenting, this thing has not gone away. that's still MCP for you, right? You're just using it at a different rate. So I'm always a little bit confused when people go like, but MCPs, why does it tell me that that does not, that doesn't mean MCPs use it?
22:43No, it's still, it's just a different use, right? And I think you will see evolutions as we're getting better of like how we use these models and the infrastructure around it gets a bit more mature. And you suddenly can assume that most model, like AI applications will have some form of like sandboxing for execution. You can do a lot more fun stuff like that. But I don't think that the value of like a protocol that connects the model to the outside world is gone because of it. That makes sense. I see it purely as an optimization, honestly, the token optimization. Is this a good time to bring up skills?
23:15Always. So awesome. So skills is a more recent concept. Yeah. I only bring it up because it's mentally linked in my mind to progressive disclosure and to adding preset code scripts and all that. Skills can also create skills, which is very fun. Well, I think a lot of people are trying to place MCP versus skills. Obviously, they're not overlapping, but how do you view it? Yeah, I agree. I think that's the interesting part. They're not overlapping. I think they solve different things. I think skills are super great. and you know they're i think that the first that really like they're being built from the principle is progressive discovery but i think the mechanism of progressive discovery that's just universal to any type of thing you can do with the model but what skills do they like they give you the domain knowledge for like a specific set of tasks like how you are how you behave how should the model behave as a data scientist or how should the model this um behave as i don't know an accountant or whatever but mcp gives you the connectiveness of the actual actions that you can take in with the outside world and so i think they're somewhat um orthogonal in like in terms of like the skills really gives you this domain knowledge just like kind of vertical and then like mcp gives you this horizontal of like okay you know give me that one action and of course skills can take actions they can take actions because you can have code and scripts in there and that's great but it has two interesting aspects that i think people got the first one is you need an execution environment So you need to use the way to execute.
24:46Your machine, yeah. Yes, and that's perfectly fine for, you know, if you like run a local, like, you know, cloud code or something. Then we can talk about like CLIs, for example. In those scenarios where you have like an execution environment, these things make a lot of sense. And then it's great. Or if you have a remote execution environment, then it makes a lot of sense. But you still don't get authentication in that regard. And so what I think MCP brings is the authentication piece. It brings the piece that you don't have to, like an external person, like for example, if you have like a linear MTP server, they can improve the server.
25:18You don't have to deal with that in your skill, right? It's not fixed in space. And then the third part is that you don't necessarily need an execution environment because the execution environment is effectively somewhere else on the server. And so if you build a web application or like a mobile application, these things work better in some of these regards. So I think they are orthogonal in that regard for the most part. And I've seen some quite cool deployments where people use skills to explore different functions, the accountant, the engineer, the data scientist, and then use MCP servers to connect these skills to the actual data sources within the company.
26:01And I think that's actually a really fun model. And I think that's the closest how I think about this. Yeah, so MCP is the connectivity layer, I think is the word that you choose. The communication layer. communication later yeah so is it um architecturally i'm wondering if it's like the mcp's client inside of each skill or is there a shared client that can discover skills we do that as shared we do the shared one i think you technically want a bit more shared ones because you do the more shared you have the better the more you can do like discovery things you can do things like, okay, I have connection pooling, I can do automatic discovery of things, I can even like, you know, in a skill you might just very loosely describe what you want and I can look into the registry that I have access to and get an MCP server for you, right?
26:48These things you can do when you do it. But I think both works at the end of the day. Yeah, but this is things to experiment with. I do want to highlight for people who might have missed it, you said we do blah, blah, blah. Actually, I think nobody understands enough how much anthropic dog foods MCP. And I only understood this when I watched John Welsh do his talk at AIE where he was like, yeah, we have MCP gateway. Everything goes through this. Yeah. And like, what can you say more about that? Yeah, I mean, like, you know, we use both, right? We use a lot of, like we use a lot of skills internally.
27:21We use a lot of MCP search internally because like we have, you know, obviously, you know, you want to make it very easy for people to deploy MCP. You want to like have some form of like integration with UIDPs and so on. So we have a gateway that we've built custom purpose for ourselves. and you just gotta like deploy your mcp servers um it's all internal apps it's all internal stuff yeah yeah some of them are like external things like like technically external things but in the lack of them offering a first party one we have our own like we have a slack mcp server which i love to use that have cloud like summarize my slack for me and so there's quite a lot of usage for that like we even have like an mcp server we like we're doing like a semi a biannual survey, for example, around how we feel about the company, about the future, about AI, about safety, these type of things.
28:06And we have an MCP server for that. And they can ask a lot of questions around the results, which is really fun. Is it your team maintaining it? No. We maintain it in a gateway. But I think one of the fun parts is when we started MCP, it was always, like MCP before we even open source it, it was born of the idea of like, I'm in a company that is growing crazy. I'm in the development side of things, development tooling side of things, I will grow slower than the rest. How can I build something that they can all build for themselves? And that's really the origin story of MCP. And so it's fun to see a year later, like that's what's actually going on.
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28:41It's like people build MCP servers for themselves. I probably don't even know 90 % of the MCP servers that are anthropic because, you know, they might be in research and I might not even see them or I just don't know because people build for themselves. But do they host it themselves? Is there a remote? They effectively have a command to launch it. And it just launches in a Kubernetes cluster for them. So it's like partially managed. Yeah, that's good infra for anyone at a large company to build. Any platform infra. There are platforms that offer that to you. For us, from a security perspective, we want to build these ourselves.
29:15But they're like, the person who built Fast MCP, Jeremiah. like a company that offers like fast mcp cloud which is a little bit like that you just like two commands and you have a running instance of an mcp server that talks stream of http and then a lot of internal like a lot of enterprises use things like light llm as a gateway and then they can even do like just launch standard ios servers attach them to the the gateway and the gateway does all the authentication all the hard parts of mcp for them and so there's a lot of ways to do this but that's good infrastructure you really want to have is just like make it trivial make one command to just launch an MCP server that was a standard IO server and suddenly the stream of HTTP server was authentication integrated and you as a developer only had to do the standard IO part.
30:00Yeah, I love calling that stuff out because people will take that and actually put this into their companies. So yeah, otherwise, also the alternative is chaos. Oh yeah, well, no. Reinventing everything. Shout out to Jeremiah. Actually, I did invite him to do a workshop on Fast MCP at my New York summit. Here recently, our very great blog post about a lot of the usage of MCP you're actually seeing is internal in companies. And that's actually what we see at the moment, too. It's really cool. In what companies? Internally in companies. In big enterprises, you see MCP everywhere. And it's actually way growing way faster than you would think because it's mostly internal to companies and we are people seeing it.
30:41About discovery. So you launched a registry. There were registry companies. There were gateway companies. the official registry now has other registries putting their own MCP in your official registry. We need more registries, man. I mean, just one more, bro. One more. Yeah, what's the registry to rule them all? Any learning from that? Like launching a registry for like a new technology and like whether or not, you know, people like, you know, Smithery is one example, right? If you go on the official registers, like all these Smithery AI MCPs that you need to authenticate through them. So it's kind of like just a pass-through registry in a way.
31:17How do you see, how is this going to shake out? I think we saw a lot of these different registries come up and we really felt that there is a need for basically like an NPM, PyPy kind of approach to this, where there's one more central entity that is where everybody can publish an MCP server too. And that's really where the original registry came from. And we really wanted to make sure that at least we're encouraging the ecosystem to have a common standard of what these registries can talk to. Because what we want to do, We want to live in a world where a model can auto-select an MCP server from a registry, install it, and then for the given task that you have at hand, and then you just use it, right?
31:55It should kind of feel magic. But for that, you need, like, some form of standardized interface. And so we've got to do, and that was really the inflection point of, like, we started quite early working with the GitHub folks, even in April. And then I got distracted with other things, like authentication. and work on that. And so what I want to see, and I think where we slowly, but this is slowly heading, is a world where we have the official registry where everybody can put their MCP server, but this is the equivalent to an NPM, which has the exact same problems of an NPM. Like everybody can put it there.
32:32Basically, you don't know what to trust and what not to trust. You have supply chain attacks. These are just fundamental properties of public registries. I mean, that's why we have this concept of sub-registries, which then like the smitheries and others hopefully can do where they can filter and curate on top of it. And that's really the world we want to live in. I don't think we're quite there yet but we're slowly getting there. Like the GitHub registry is curated after or speaks the same format as the official registry. And so what we want is like you as a company can have an internal registry that is a curated form of the official one plus maybe your own ones.
33:09I mean that's the one you trust and it speaks the same API than the official one. And if you have like a VS code or anything else that wants to talk to your registry, you just connect it to yours and you're good to go. And that's really what we want to do. It's interesting because NPM, in a way, it's almost like a download gateway, you know? It's like, I'm not really using NPM for discovery that often. I don't go to NPM and search for packages. It's kind of like, I find them in other ways. Is this you doing? Yeah. Yeah, I'm interested if you see like discovery as like a core piece of like the registry or like if you still assume that like there's going to be some other way that the agent discovers.
33:46I do think discovery is important in the model world, but I think that's where it's different from MPM because we're building like something for AI first and we can assume there's an intelligent model that knows what it wants. I think that's something that didn't exist before, right? If you, maybe, I don't know, if you would build modern package management systems with models at heart, maybe you would do a similar approach of just like, here's what I want to build, just figure out. I don't care what packages you install, just do it, right? I mean, that's the equivalent in the end of the day. But again, with the public registry, you should probably not do this because it's a dumping ground for everybody.
34:23You want to do it against a curated, trusted registry. I like your phrasing that the model knows what it wants. Yeah. Because I think there's a dream that agents can use DMCP directories to discover new servers, install it for itself. That seems like very AGI if it works. Yes. But it may not work. And I wonder what needs to happen in order to do that. I do think we need a good registry interface on one hand. And then the second part is just like, we need to build for this and see how it works and what does. We need like trust levels maybe. You will definitely need trust levels. You need trust levels.
34:59You might need some form of like, yeah, you need trust levels. You might need some form of signatures, for example, like one of the ideas. I'm not sure if we're going to do it. It was just a random idea, but one of the ideas I always had is like, you can attach like signatures from like different model providers that have scammed this MTP server and say, we trust this. Here's the signature from Anthropic that these tool descriptions are safe. And here's the, like the signature from OpenAI that these are trusted by us. And then you can decide. Oh, wow. So I think these distributed code signing.
35:29It may be a long time delay. And it's not just really distributed, it's just like central in a way, right? But I think this is the kind of stuff you will require. But I think in the simplest form, what you can do, where you probably see it first, is in scenarios like internally to a company where you have inherent trust because they will use a private registry. They're effectively using private registries already for NPM, they're using it for PyPy, and they will also do it for MCP servers. In there, you have implicit trust and then you can just search. And I think that's really the interesting ground where we want to experiment.
36:04And that's like, we have our internal registry in an effective way because when you launch via John's infrastructure, like an MCP7, it gets registered, right? And so we need to go and experiment with that too. Okay. I actually wanted to also ask, you started running some events over in London. Yeah. You had the Agents Hackathon and you had Dev Summit that you called out in your timeline. Yeah. I just wanted to get anecdotal stories of stuff you learned as you saw the community spring to life? So we had two big summits this year at the MCP Dev Summit in San Francisco. And the one in London too, yeah.
36:41And the one in London. And I think what you learn is a few things. I think that the one thing is that's very hard to get otherwise is just like these stories around how people use it internally in their companies. And there you see some of the struggles, but you see also some of the success stories. And one of the interesting bits which I really loved is like, particularly in London, you had a lot of financial people there because it's like a financial hub and it was actually the whole conference was in the financial district and learning just like the kind of problems of like things you need to enforce because you have legal contracts, because like financial like regulations.
37:22These were things that were, that I did not know before and I learned a lot about like, okay, what does like a thing like an MCP, like a communication layer need to look like if you have these like constraints that in a normal like development world doesn't exist. Like I'll give you an example. Like if you are in financial services and you're exposing some data, that data might be coming from a third party and you must guarantee that you attribute that third party and it's a legal contract, right? You must like if the client has placed this data to you, it must tell you this came from this third party, right?
37:57And these are constraints that just like in the normal model world don't really exist, right? But in the financial industry, this is legally enforced. And so these are the things you're like, okay, how will this work in a world where we fall for MCP? And so now that's when we started creating this financial services interest group that Bloomberg is heading up to figure out what are some of the things that a client must do if it wants to speak to our financial services, MCP server, for example, and what are the things that need to be respected. And I think that's the kind of things you only learn on the ground, in the conferences, talking to people, right?
38:35So I think there was some of these learnings there. I think the other things that you just see is like just how many people are building and just the excitement and like the creativity that some people bring to this, like that I just love, right? Like, and from Eric, you didn't expect, right? Like I love the guys at Turkish Airlines that just built like the Turkish Airlines MCP servers you can search for flights and stuff like that. So that was always fun. And I love when people bring some really creative parts to the MCP ecosystem. So I love these communities when they come together because you're just meeting things that are a little bit outside of your bubble and you just get some input.
39:08And I think there's a lot of learning there. And so we're going to repeat it again. We're going to do it in New York in April, I think, or March or something like that. And then we're going to do it again six months later. And I absolutely love that. Any good sampling use cases that you found? Not so much. That's always the, you know, last time we talked about this, you should use it more. We fix sampling a little bit, man. I think one thing I learned from sampling, everyone wants to use tools with sampling in tools that are not exposed via the MCP server. Like when you want to do something, you want to have a set of new tools that you only want to use during that sample call.
39:41And we just had no ability to do it. And we just fixed it in this iteration. And so we hope to see a little bit more sampling use cases. You will find every now and then an MCP server that does it. but particularly as MCP servers have moved away from more local to be more remote. In remote cases, it's probably always better for you to bring an SDK because you have full control. You can deploy it. You can deploy an API case and maybe even charge someone. In a local case where something is really powerful because you're shipping something to a lot of people and you don't know what is their, what is the model that they have configured?
40:15What is the application they plug it in? It might be VS Code, it might be Cloud Desktop, right? And in those cases, something is useful, but also like clients just don't support it. So sometimes it's one of these things I'm like, I'm still sad about it. I still think it's a very powerful idea. But, you know, you got to win some, you got to lose some, you know. No, no, no. You're also, you know, upgrading it. And, you know. My hopes are still up there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like my, in some ways, you know, when you get it right, this will be the real agent-to-agent protocol. Yes, yes. Are most of the use cases that you see still data consumption?
40:48That's been my use case for MCP mostly. Yeah, it's context engineering. and forgetting data. Well, the most action MNCP takes is like update the linear task status. Have you seen very complex like MCP taking action workflows or are still people mostly using it for context? Most people use it for context. I think that's a vast majority of usage. It is in the name, model context. Yeah, yeah. And Nick Cooper from OpenAI always keeps telling me, rightfully so, that the name MCP was probably a little bit poorly chosen because it feels it restricts it a little bit, which I agree with. It's mostly data use cases.
41:27I've seen people doing deep research via it. I think people expose agents via it, and so they are a little bit more complex, but it's not super common. It's what people have experimented with. They have the deep research use case, I think it's a good one. That's not too uncommon, where people do custom research for it. But beyond that, yeah, most of it is really data. Beyond data and deep research aspects, now you have also this new aspect where people expose like UI components or MCPUI or what we're going to call MCPI in the future. And I think that's super, super promising. And I think that's really quite fun.
42:08That's actually you see a lot now with ChatGPT apps, with MCPUI in general, that you see a lot. Yeah, and you have the tasks in the last... In the tasks. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm curious because like if most use cases are like context and then you build tasks, it's almost like people are not really using it for tasks. So I'm curious like how you design it, like what you expect people to use. We design tasks because people come to us and go like, okay, we really want long running operation, which is basically agents. We want like a long, deep, deep research task that finishes in an hour. We want tasks that like might not finish within a day, right?
42:41And people have like awkwardly tried to do this with your tools and you can. Because tools are effectively just an RPC interface at the end of the day, but it gets very quickly awkward because now the model needs to understand, oh, I need to pull this. And it's just not very fun. It's just not a first-class primitive. And you run into a lot of limitations. But it's come from the fact that people want to have a long-running agent. And that's something we heard from so many areas and people trying to do this, that we really felt we needed to do something like a task. Like on GitHub issues from big companies, everybody was like we need something that long running operations is really top of mind so I really think now we're going to see a lot of it but it's a little bit early to see how good it's going to go because it just landed in the S &P case and it needs to land in the clients and then we're going to see more of it but I think you will see a lot of the custom deep research parts in others Yeah, I'm very bullish on tasks I think it was very important to get right basically every orchestration or protocol needs has a sync version and an async version yeah exactly has an async version any like design choices that you want to call out that you know there were two directions and you picked one in just the overall design of tasks yeah in design there was a lot of conversations like some somewhere like okay is this just asynchronous tools do we do a different primitives in the end of the day it was important for me my litmus test for it was always it needs to be able to like Like if I want to expose something like Cloud Code or like any other like coding agent as an MCP server, hypothetically, this needs to work.
44:19And a pure asynchronous tool call would just not do this. You want some form of operation that can return, for example, intermediate results in the long term. You want like, okay, I got to this result by calling this tool, this tool, this tool. I had this other input. I had this other tool. I did this. And now this is the result, right? That's really what you want to expose. and task is early and it doesn't do that just yet but it's built in a way that it will be generic enough to be able to support this. That was the main constraint. The other constraint was making sure it is it's it's not a copy of tools where you can think about like okay we just do tools again have slightly different semantics but instead what it's doing is like just like you can create a task by calling a tool with a certain set of metadata fields.
45:14And then it automatically creates a task. So the task itself is just the concept of a container that can do something asynchronously. You do something asynchronously from starting here into ending here. And the thing we're doing is a tool call. I mean, that opens the door to later plug in other things and maybe even other tasks. Like observability as well. Yeah, potentially. Which is obviously going to be important. So I think that was really the design goal, which makes it a little bit more abstract, a little bit more complicated to implement, but that goes away because the SDKs just do it for you.
45:43And the SDK, in the end of the day, you just go like, async call this, and you return something. I mean, there you start to overlap with other async, like trpc in JavaScript land, or whatever Go, Protobuf stuff that Go people have. In the end of the day, it's designed like a classic operating system, interface, like you create a task, you pull it until it's done. And then you can make an optimization, which we're going to do in the next round, which we didn't get around. It's like, okay, instead of having to pull every minute or hour or whatever interval you choose, the server can call us events, call you like a webhook or something and go like, I'm done, right?
46:27That's the optimization. But the actual core interface is always that the client can pull. And that's actually how like operating file system operations and an operating system can work is like you pull, it has the file changed, has the file changed, but you can also use like a modern interface on the kernel, like iNotify or something like that or Uring or something like that to tell you, oh, I'm done. Great. Yeah. The file has changed. There's a trick I learned where like servers can hold the HTTP connection until it's done and then they terminate and that's the signal to the callback. Yeah, which we do not necessarily want to do because it might take a few days and I don't know how people...
47:02It's very irresponsible, but it's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there are plenty of ways. I think we were just going to go the Webhook way, honestly. Tasks are really interesting. And we basically have to invent this when we did this at the Devon API, Cognition. And I think that's also an interesting reinvention of like, well, everyone is going to need some kind of long-running operation. And this is, well, when you're calling an agent, you also need this. Yeah. But the interesting part for us is what MCP is always trying to do. MCP always tries to encapsulate what currently people are trying to do.
47:36And we not want to be prescriptive of what you're supposed to do in a year from now. We don't predict. We did tasks because people are like, we need this now, right? We needed this basically six months ago. And we're like, okay, I guess now it's time to do this, right? Instead of trying to do, being predictive of the future, which is why we're trying to keep the protocol somewhat minimal and have, I think, to some degree achieve this, although other people would think already there's too many primitives in the protocol. One minor thing, and so let's say super long-running pass. Lots of messages go back and forth.
48:08Anthropic actually was a kind of leader in context compression and compaction, maybe, let's just call it. And I think a lot of the other labs are also doing the same thing. Is there a way to handle that or do we just statelessly sort of cut context and it's fine? Do you need a full log of everything that happens? Or no, you just ask the fellow. Yeah, right? No, you don't. Like, I think we, I think they're, this is the thing right we're very early in the industry still we're learning a lot about like what does the model need what does not need right um and even today like some agents start to like drop two call results after a few rounds because they don't need it anymore and i think that's very very very good and so i think besides compaction you will see i um just better mechanics of like understanding what you need and what you don't need like for a long asynchronous this test you might have a way where like okay maybe for a while the model sees it but once you get the result you just drop everything else or you might might even call like a small model like a haiku modeling or like what all this i should retain tell me right like you might be like the agi build approach would be just like let the model figure out what it needs to retain right and so you can you can see both worlds in them and i think there's just lots to learn i think there's not the one answer yet because i think we're still figuring these type of things out and we're just improving.
49:26And compaction is a good step for it, but I don't think it's the last step there either. It's actually the most obvious one, but I don't think it's like, I think if you pay more attention to it, if you particularly think about like, okay, what could you train a model to do here? I think we get to much better ways of doing that, but they're all like independent from how you obtain the context. And I think MCPI always see is like back to like it's an application layer protocol. That's just how you obtain the context, how you select the context that's the problem for the application. And that's the problem all the agent applications will have at the end of the day.
49:58And there will be a lot of different techniques. A year ago, everybody would have told you it's rag style stuff, but it's now apparently dead, right? And now we do use models, we use compaction. So I don't know what's going to happen in a year from now. Cool. Around MCPs, another question I had is like, how do you see them as being used by developers to build AI apps versus being a protocol for AI consumers to plug things in? I think that's one of the main things people get wrong, where it's like, well, I can just use a REST API. Why do I need MCP? And to me, it's almost like, it's not really for the developers to use.
50:31It's for people using AI tools to just plug things in. I get the comparison with the REST APIs quite a lot. And I think it's funny enough, because there's two problems in general. The first one is REST does not tell you what to do on authentication. The second part is that really complains to me about tool bloat. Have you looked at the average open API spec length? If you put that into a model, you will have a lot of bloat there too, right? Actually way worse. And funny enough, when people try to map one-to-one things, often the model gets slightly confused because you have search by name, search by ID, search by something, right?
51:05And suddenly you have five tools that look very similar to each other and the model goes like, which one do you want, right? I have no clue anymore. So anyway, that side note to REST versus MCP. But I do think MCP, I want to live in a world where it's like very like much like a consumer focused thing but something consumers shouldn't know about well then what i want is i want a world where you go to your application you say do this and it should just do the thing and it should just connect with the right services that mcp is under the hood is a detail or that the developer needed to know about because that's the communication channel they're talking but in the end of the day you just get the tasks done right and they and I actually prefer a world where nobody of, like my mom should not know what MCP is, right?
51:52If she wants to use cloud at the end of the day. But I do think it's very focused on that pluggability of like an external like service and in that regard more like on the consumer focus side. And there are still use cases for developers in general, like first of all as builders, but also like I still love my Playwright MCP server, man. I thought Chrome developer tool. The new Chrome one is like the new meta. I also understand like for developers, right, like that run cloud code locally, you know, like things like PLIs can be better approved, right, to some degree. And that's okay. I'm curious about the MCP apps UI with what you're talking about, where it's like every client, like ChatGPT has their own, right?
52:35So it's like if I'm used to the MCP app of this product, but then if I go in ChatGPT, there's like a different version that they curated. it's kind of like a different experience. So I'm curious how you feel about that. Like, do you feel, especially now that you have OpenAI and the foundation, right? Do you feel like all of this will be MCP backed in the same structure? There's two influences, right? Like MCP UI existed as a project, which had a lot of really good ideas. OpenAI took some of them and really improved upon them. And now one thing we just announced three weeks ago on the MCP blog is that we're actually working with all two of them together to build like a common standard.
53:14And so we're really hoping that we're getting back to the world where you build for one platform and you can use it across all of them. You build for... Right ones run everywhere. For ChatGPT, and you might be able to use it in Cloud or in the Goose or whatever it might be that the program of your choice that implements this. But I think the general problem is what we have is I think that there are certain problems like if you think about a modern AI application, everything is very text-based and that's okay. it's nice but there's things that as a human you're just way better suited to do in visual right the most basic example is like you want to like book a flight seat selection right like you now get select like you want to do seat selection in text it's like here's like the 25 seats you have available like nobody fucking wants to do that right like I have no clue where these seats are even that sheet based drawing yeah I don't know if a horse you want an application that you can select with or it might be like a theater that you want to book for or something like that it's so obvious that you do want to have some form of like an application in the user interface that the model can navigate and that the model can interact with, but you as a human can also interact at the same time.
54:22And I think that's what we're looking for. And so I think it's just this next iteration of like building richer interfaces because the pure text interface is just somewhat limited and there's very natural things. And you're like, you see this in music production, you will see it, of course, or you will have like certain brands that will deeply care about presenting their interface. Shopping is a good example, man. like shopping has like 20 years of like A, B testing what's the best way to sell you something right and so shopping interfaces are super complicated actually and you just want a way for displaying that to the user so that it's familiar to them and that they can interact with it and that's what MCP apps is at the end of the day technical direction wise is the iframe the way that was yeah it's an iframe you are serving basically raw HTML over an MCP resource.
55:12It goes into an iframe and then it talks to the outside where post messages over a specific interface. And so what you can do now, you can, because it's raw HTML and you're not really like loading some external content, you're going to get, you can analyze it in advance if you wanted to with security. And because you have an iframe, you can, like the external application, like can just speak like a very clear bond or like security bounded. Yeah, and this has been in browsers forever. I think that I'm scared of it only because I hate cores issues. Yeah. And iFrames always have cores issues. Yeah.
55:46But this, again, this does not load anything external. Like it should not, right? Like there probably are restrictions that we like then iterate and iterate. And then in five years, maybe it has 25 cores headers and whatnot, whatever, right? But I think we're starting small again. It was like pure raw HTML. You should probably not have external references. We don't run into these issues, but you're right. and can I inherit styles no I think you need to put it in mind yeah obviously you will want it I feel like this is really minor but UI people care about this it should look like chatgbt me and try to chatgbt should like cloud I think that's a very good question I 100 % agree with you like brands and others who deeply deeply care about it designers will 100 % and that's something we need to figure out and that's where you need to get it out of the door and see how people use it and then iterate on it.
56:40That's why I don't think it should be an iframe long-term. I don't know what the solution is. But we need a new iframe that lets some permeability because of this stuff. I think that's sensible, yes. But the other solution to the problem is the IGI build approach of just give it a tool that says, give me a style sheet. And the model can call you and tell you what you're supposed to look like. okay should an mcp app be know what it's being used what the parent application is is you know what i mean like it might be like the the application also exposes tools right that the model is free to call it right right right okay so maybe standard is an interface for people to pass down styles yeah maybe i don't know but it's a it's a very good question let me let me ask the team i'm just like i'm mostly like directly there i'm like not in the weeds of doing everything there.
57:28Yeah, it seems like a little bit of a surprise to me. I never really paid any attention to MCPUI and then suddenly you guys all adopted it and I was like, okay, well, I guess this is a part of MCPUI now. And it went from a purely backend concern to now frontend. It's also like Notable is technically an extension to MCPUI, like it's not MCPUI, that's a pure technicality because... It's a governance thing, right? Yeah, it's mostly like if you are a client that can render HTML, then you might want to consider implementing it, but you're still an MCP client if you don't. And the reality is your average CLI agent can't do it, right?
58:07So they will never do it. And so I think that's fine. Are there any other extensions that are similar? We're going to look into financial services as an extension where like, okay, you might end up in a world really a year from now there might be clients that have certifications that they are an AMP and get a signature that they are financial services MCP clients. And they can prove it for the server. And only then the server allows connections because it knows they are respecting attributions, these daily contracts that you put into place. And you will see this everywhere. You will, if you want to deal in the long run with public servers and public clients that do like deal with HIPAA data, like healthcare data, you will have to have guarantees.
58:49Isn't it part of just auth or auth? Not necessarily. Like I give you an example. Like if I have, The client might need to have five servers installed. And if there's one healthcare server, that healthcare server might tell you, you are not allowed in this session to use any of the other MCP servers because this data I'm giving you cannot leave you, right? You must guarantee that this data doesn't go anywhere else because it's HIPAA data, because it's financial data, whatever it might be. This is a good example. And that might be some of the enforcements you need to do. because you just like, you don't want to have your or social security number or healthcare data show up in the near of accident, right?
59:28Awesome. We're going to transition and have the rest of the AAIF group join, but any final call to action, like either, you know, people that should join your team, people that should contribute to the MCP spec or anything else? I think the most important part is still building with MCP on a day-to-day basis for people to just go out, build really good MCP servers. I think we see a lot of mediocre MCP servers and some very, very good ones. And just building good MCP servers, looking at how to use them. I think that's super important. The second aspect to that is we're a fairly open community and we're running it as a traditional open source project that is based purely on what people are able to put in in terms of effort and time.
1:00:13And so just being an active part, either giving us feedback, being in the Discord channel, talking with us, giving us ideas, while also just helping us implementing the types of SDKs, the Python SDKs, we're always looking for new SDKs, right? Like we have ActiveGo SDK development, but like we don't have a Haskell SDK. I don't know if you're a Haskell developer, maybe you want to write that, right? Yeah, there you go. And so I think there's a bunch of stuff we can do and be part of it. And I think, I don't understand how much you can just be part of the community, but also just like go and build.
1:00:43And I think there's so much opportunity now, particularly to build like amazing clients now that we have understood progressive discovery better. Now that we have understood code mode better. there's just this next iteration of clients to build and the next iteration of servers to build that I'm just looking forward for people to do. My last question or call out is, I wanted people to hear directly from you. I sense the energy. I'm very excited by everything that you're doing. But a lot of people are anxious about MCP joining the Linux Foundation. They're like, oh, is this Enthopic taking its eye off the ball?
1:01:16Can you address those concerns? Yeah, I love that you asked me that. I can totally see why people think that, but like it's actually quite the opposite like the commitment of anthropic is the same right i'm still we still have the same people i'm helping with the sdks we're still super committed in our products to mcp i'm still the lead core maintainer nothing has actually changed what really is the main part of the foundation is like two things the number one is like making sure that the whole industry knows that this will stay forever open that this cannot be taken away and there have been there have been like i'm probably would never do this i think but there have been histories of like companies going like, taking an open source project and suddenly making it proprietary again.
1:01:55We have protocols that are proprietary. Look at HDMI. Look at like, what's the problems of HDMI and Linux? What's on HDMI? HDMI 2.1 HDMI forum does not want to allow the AMD to develop open source Linux drivers for HDMI 2.1. Really? There's some. Look it up. So, you know, there's people like, keep a very close tap on it. And what this does is like, no, this is now owned by a neutral entity. It will always stay open. You can use the word MCP. Nobody's going to sue you over it. So there's a bunch of that just giving the ecosystem and the industry that confidence that this stays neutral. I think that's important.
1:02:37The second part to that is that I think one thing I'm, if anything, I'm the most proud of is that I think we have set the tone for open standards in the industry. and being able to now use that momentum to build like a community and a space where people can come and bring really well done, well supported, well maintained projects and have them part of this foundation. I think that's the other part to that. But the funny part is like our bar for the foundation is going to be like, it needs to be like really well maintained. It's not like you're taking the ball off. It's actually exactly that what we don't want.
1:03:19And so we will not do that for us. MCP is still core to the product and still super important, philanthropic. And so we're still just as much as committed as we've ever been. Amazing. Awesome. Thanks for joining, David. And we're here in the studio with core team members of AAF. It's the biggest panel we've ever had on the podcast. So welcome, guys. Maybe we'll go left to right and introduce everyone. And also identify the voices for people listening on audio. I'll start. I'm Jim Zemlin. I'm the CEO of the Linux Foundation. I've been working there 22 years, and I was the person who helped facilitate the launch of the foundation, but take no credit for any of the technology work.
1:03:58That's to my left. I'm Nick Cooper from OpenAI. I've been there just over two years now, I think. I'm generally OpenAI's head of a lot of protocol things and very interested in the open ecosystem and our representative for AAIF, as well as a core contributor to NCP. Got it. What's another protocol that might fall under that umbrella? Agents, ND, just in general, like not just the protocols, but also the product experiences of where OpenAI products intersect with other SaaS provider things and other systems. I'm David Soriapara. I am working at Anthropic, a member of technical staff there. I'm the co-creator of NCP and yeah, at Anthropic, I mostly lead all the NCP efforts.
1:04:43Great. And I'm Brad. I'm the principal engineer at Block. So by day, I build AI products. And by night, I work on open source like Goose and the original author of Goose. It's great to see everybody come together. Then when I heard about the news, I didn't really expect it. It wasn't on my bingo card. So maybe let's have a little bit of inside baseball. So you obviously have OpenAnentropic. And yesterday at the launch event, you were joking on how you didn't know that the two companies even talked to each other. And then, yeah, how did the conversation start? The conversation started out of two things.
1:05:15The first one is that on the MCP side, we always knew that we wanted to find a neutral home for MCP to make sure that the industry understands that this stays open, that this is something safe to adopt. And then very early in the process, as we were looking around, like, what to do about this, should this be a project in a foundation, should this be inside its own foundation, which is, like, these common patterns you see for this kind of work, we got approached by our friends at Block to discuss, because they were looking into, like, donating Goose, I think, at the time. And so there was a question around doing something together.
1:05:56and then we approached OpenAI and they were very, very welcoming and like very open to the idea as well. And it slowly like formed. And I think, you know, at the time frame of this is like a few months, these things are not happening out of thin air in like a week or so. And so just a lot of conversation, like what do we want to do? What are the kind of like constraints we want to have? And what is the thing we want to build? And of course, we were looking for where to put this kind of stuff. And that's where the Linux Foundation comes in as I think the biggest foundation of its kind and certainly has like decades of experience helping companies through a process like this and building what is technically called a directed fund within the Linux Foundation to build these kind of things out.
1:06:42I think David said basically all the story from my side as well, which is so we saw this like need to connect systems and then MCP gained such very large developer traction and we at OpenAI were very excited to like use and then contribute and actively participate in this. And from my point of view, it was always very natural that this would grow into something bigger and move to a neutral place. And like MCP has always been like a foundation for like communication between agents and contacts. In a similar way, the agentic foundation is, well, it's a foundation, but also it's like the starting point where I really look forward to other contributions like starting with Goose, our own agents MD, where we're really open for a lot of technical contributions to build out a full agentic ecosystem.
1:07:29I'm curious, Jim. I've been to Linux Foundation events before. I've spoken to them. It's almost like, is an MCP so early that how do you even structure it in a way? I'm curious because so many of the technologies that the Foundation supports are kind of like core pillars of infrastructure and the internet. This is probably like the youngest technology that you brought in as a Foundation. What are the goals of it? Yeah, I mean, I think what's interesting here is even though it's young, I think AI years are kind of like dog years. Absolutely. Do you use this metaphor? Yeah, totally. This is why I run three conferences a year.
1:08:08Yeah, exactly. You can't do annual. I think last night someone was asking, what do you see a year from now? And I'm like, well, if I dial the clock back a year, would I have anticipated where we're at right now? there's no way and so i think part of the thing with mcp is that we're just living in this kind of dog years velocity uh in the past i think things took a lot more time to coalesce and what is clear is that a lot of people are adopting mcp see it in commercial products that companies are rolling out you see a lot of usage in the enterprise already and there are still is a ways to go in terms of the technology becoming mature but i think the the same thing held in internet protocols you know that took a little bit longer to mature and the internet matured over time but i think the thing i'm most excited about it's becoming clear that mcp will be a key protocol for this technology movement and i think you know david and these folks were all pretty wise to realize that you know if internet protocols had been owned by a single entity he'd still be calling it america online america online it like you know it would be it wouldn't work and uh i think that this has got all of the underpinnings to be a huge movement and at the linux foundation we ask three questions for every project will this be meaningful and impactful for industry and society uh the second question is do you need more than one organization to collaborate to do it otherwise you don't need us.
1:09:41In this case, clearly we've got that. Then three, can we get the resources and build an ecosystem around it? And 50 companies on day one, you know, a huge set of folks in line to participate. And join my mail inbox. I'm sure your guys are too. It's like full in 24 hours. How do I participate? We want to contribute. How do I get in there? I've never seen that kind of inbound interest starting any project at the linux foundation in 22 years how do you pick so you got all these people reaching out you know there's good and bad it's a really good question i think it's like how to pick uh how we expand the foundation itself from a governance standpoint but also like technical contributions and how can the foundation best support them as well that's like really top of my mind it's like the first thing we need to like define some structure and work out how to bring it all together.
1:10:37But I think even before those details, there's such value in establishing this one forum that people can come to. Even having a list of eager technical participants and potential opportunities, that's a huge opportunity in front of us to distill what's truly meaningful to developers, users, and everyone. And very appreciate the Link Foundation Reacting is sort of a galvanizing rod for this attention. brad on on the sort of block and goose side it's an interesting the involvement that you guys have had in the sort of engagement you guys have had uh what was your calculus in joining the aif so for us i think it's uh like in developing something like goose i think it the thing that i see it as being part of this umbrella is it's the most concrete piece so you can actually like download Goose and use it in a way that you can download an AGS MD.
1:11:33Like what, what are those parts do together without having something that actually like connected to clients, like a real client. And there's, I think a lot of value in that because when you, you get into the code protocol space, you want to add things to it, but you have to actually show like what is enabling, like why are you making the protocol wider and putting it into like a reference implementation shows you like, oh it's giving this value to people like very concretely and i think there's some like for example there's like a spec uh for mcp mcp apps that is brand new and we've been working on mcp ui for goose yeah so so goose has been like kind of a day one partner with the mcp ui team oh and so now we've had mcp apps we'll go we have opened an issue today about how we're going to go get that into goose and so that's something where i'm people i think you hear something abstract like that like what is send what is the server sending an iframe to the client like do and i think goose is a place where you can see it like okay you're going to build a dashboard or you're going to have this enhanced chat experience and so this is something where i think we collaborate more and more to say like this is what it looks like and how you look at some of these abstract things and make them real i think the other tidbit here maybe like back to the history of of both mcp and goose is like Goose was the first open source agent interface or agent that reached out to us and worked with us to integrate MCP.
1:12:57And I think Rad is actually like technically the first non-anthropic contributor to MCP ever on like day two or something like that, like very, very early. So this goes all the way back to like November last year to like the partnership of having MCP inside Goose. Yeah, we had a version of Goose that was still, you can go check the GitHub history. It was there a little bit before MCP came out and we were sitting there with like a plugin ecosystem who were like, this is awful. Like what, like why would you, why would anyone, yeah, why would anyone come develop a plugin just for Goose? But we saw all these opportunities and so we started talking to Anthropic and we were like, I think that there's a space here for a protocol.
1:13:37And they're like, well, let me tell you about, and it was really cool to see, you know what the Zets site. No, no, no, we didn't. We reached out before we heard the Zet thing. And so we were like, okay, like, yes, we just want to, like, we want to pile onto something that has a chance of succeeding because as like a client, it's like an ecosystem, right? Like the more people are using it, you get more value as a client than as a server because, you know, your servers are going to work with any client. And then as a client, you know, you have this giant library of servers. And so that's been like a big part of what Goofs does is that it's not really like it is a coding tool.
1:14:10people use it as a coding tool but you can turn off the code part and you can just connect to any MCP server and so it can be like operating like a science experiment, I've seen that or just like Google Docs or whatever and I think that it kind of shows you how MCP goes beyond just like the byte coding space Yeah, I think as well it's also the fact that it's concrete is so important, like for all these standards like there's a long history of standards throughout computing that like people like proactively write a standard and then when you know the when it's actually tried out it has problems yeah but like for mcp and like all these new agentic standards we're coming with we really want demonstrated utility like what the most common thing on the core committee is like there's a proposal and we come back to people saying like have you tried it out does it work but the protocol is about communication so if you're trying something out you need collaborators and you need like concrete open source projects like Goose, any clients, any variety of servers, because it's only with that sort of open ecosystem that you can meaningfully understand if this is actually going to work.
1:15:17I totally agree with that. I mean, I think the world of standards and open source development are just merging, right? You sort of co-develop these things together. I think I was trying to figure out whether David is VentSurf or Linus Torvalds for agents. and I think maybe it's a little more, it leans a little more event surf and then maybe Ghost is a little more Apache web server and my whole Linus part kind of falls apart at that point. But you do need something substantive to try the protocols out in order to make sure you know how to improve them. It's that feedback loop that's so critical.
1:15:56OpenAI also has a coding agent that is open source. I think what's the thinking there apart from like, well, would Codex ever be donated to AIF? Or we just don't know yet. I think the short answer is we don't know yet. But like, it's sort of like a feedback loop, which is in this open ecosystem, like we don't want to have too much alignment all on like one implementation, one thing. There's like real value to users and developers or whoever's the participant to active competition in some parts. So there's this balance of we need openness to foster collaboration and experimentation. But I would like to see a variety of coding agents and each one might deliver unique value, different value, and be free to explore independently.
1:16:46So it is sort of like a careful balance here. There's a bit of like a taste-making approach to contribute things that benefit from being open. Like AgentsMD is an example, which is open up any GitHub repository, it has this file, it works the same way. Like if everyone sort of did their own thing there, that's very low value, potentially damaging in a way. But so there's commonality value, whereas for actual concrete implementations and projects, it's great to have reference implementations in many ways or experimental grounds like Goose, but I really favor a huge variety of them because that way we'll see what comes to be the best.
1:17:23Is there a roadmap for what you want to add? For example, the Agenda Commerce protocol, like ChatGPT already uses, but that's not a part of it. There's no model as a part of the foundation. Do you already have a roadmap? Or like you said, you're just kind of like going month by month and what are people using and what should be in there? I think we don't have a roadmap in the sense of like projects lined up. But I think what we have is principles, but which we will select products to some degree. and I think the effort here is mostly around sitting together after the foundation is created and then evolving these principles as we're seeing people going to ask us about the projects they would want to put in and then develop the foundation further as time goes.
1:18:12But in the moment, I think the most important part is that we have the principles in place and then go and having the conversations with people who want to be part of this foundation? One principle that really comes to mind to me is composability. I often use the analogy of Lego blocks sort of thing, which is agentic systems are a sum of many, many parks. And so something that I hope the foundation can evolve to do is have these interoperable composable bits that will work together, pinkly. And so we don't have a roadmap of future contributions. but like I welcome all contributions that play nice with other contributions and like really create this potentially like a future flexible open agentic stack to be like not a universal agent but an agent that suits everyone's purpose or need yeah it's tricky you got it's a hard and these guys have the harder job of early in innovation cycle you don't want to restrict innovation by saying like, oh, well, this is the one versus that one.
1:19:17But you also don't want to let every single random thing into an organization like this. And so I do think you need this, tastemaking is a good way to describe it, where a group of elite architects and developers, folks like the three people sitting next to me, are more curating. And some things can work, Some things might not, but there needs to be a process which I think will define to do that curation that happens via tastemakers. And it's more of a, not just more, but essentially a technical effort, not something where a committee of folks from vendors get together and say, well, my product should be in this roadmap and that guy's product should be in this roadmap.
1:20:07It tends to not be very successful. Which leads to this other principle that we really want projects that have a little traction, that are well-maintained, that are very, very healthy in the plantation. I think that's super important to us. Right. I think you're looking for something to have already found a niche and to be established because you don't really want to be pushing a speculative architecture. You really want to be embracing something that already works. And so I think a lot of the stuff that we're talking about, like payments or like kind of, I really enjoy the like interface to model architectures.
1:20:44I think those are really interesting, but it's not yet obvious that that pattern needs to exist. And so that's something where we can go see it and like try to make it work in some projects and then can bring that back if it really has a role. And on the opposite, what's my incentive to bring my project to? I have a project with adoption, it's well-maintained, it's healthy. what's the benefit that I get from donating to the foundation? I mean, I can start that, but I'd love to hear from these guys as well. I think what you, all technology is an implicit futures contract, right? And so, you know, if there's technology that has traction and that traction sort of wants to be built upon, having that technology at a neutral place like the Agentec AI Foundation, where the whole industry is making decisions about how to invest.
1:21:39And when I say investment, I don't mean like becoming a member of the foundation because you don't need to become a member to participate on the technical side. It's decisions about, hey, I'm going to assign 10 of my company's engineers to co-develop this with your organization, the contributing organization. And that's a way that we can all essentially co-develop together. And that will provide better support, more development velocity, higher code quality because more people are participating in it. And that's a massive incentive if you want your technology to actually be used and adopted in industry and get more feedback and kind of a positive feedback loop of great project that gets great products in the market.
1:22:27that market feedback then allows companies to make money off of them. They then pay engineers to improve the project, better products, more profits, better project. And that's the incentive, which is a pretty high one. Could I add a technical sort of spin, which is none of these things are built in a vacuum. All these projects build on lessons and learnings or practical code from other projects. And that's a big opportunity. like any technical contribution will bring its own unique value to the foundation. At the same time, it then gets to learn the lessons that all the other participants in the foundation do.
1:23:06And like, I found it really valuable over this past year working with David and others on the MCP committee about like, it's actually that communication thing that makes our ideas more robust, makes the implementation better. We can be sure it's secure and safe and actually works. This requires communication. and that sort of the foundation is the natural like town square for this in a way so one last angle on this i think if if you're working on a standard or a protocol this is such an obvious decision right like the value in the protocol is about how many people are adopting it so being a part of this like gets you that reach but i will say as someone who's working on a client and not a protocol i think there's value there too right like we want this to be part of the foundation because we like develop these ideas together to your point.
1:23:52And so it makes it better. Like we're, we're donating goose because we think it's going to make it a higher quality tool. I actually have a followup question on just the LF side. LF has many other funds and, and, and organizations including data, data and AI foundation as well as like dedicated like PyTorch and all the other ones. I guess why a new foundation? Well, because everyone's special. No, I think that the way we look at in this space, and I'll put aside the projects in semiconductor tech and operating systems and stuff, but in AI, we think of it sort of like how the market has evolved.
1:24:33It started with tools like PyTorch and the transformer tech that is used to create LLMs. The Linux Foundation kind of took a pass on a frontier model world because in the open source space, having connection to the internet and some intelligence and a computer, that's sort of entry. In the world of frontier LLMs, it's a computer connection to the internet, some intelligence,$2 billion worth of GPUs and a ton of data. Harder for consortiums to do that kind of work. So pass. Then you look at how reasoning models have come out, need to be, in inference world, things need to be scalable. Okay, now you've got interesting technology, VLLM, Ray, things like that.
1:25:21They have to be deployed on something. Kubernetes is sort of that. These are all distinct components. Agents are a distinct enough set of technology that it merits its own community. Except for from data and AI. Yeah, because like a PyTorch dev isn't really doing a ton of stuff in agent land, right? Somebody working on dockling maybe is a little more adjacent, but not quite the same as somebody who's working on transformer tech or VLLM. And so they are logical categories. I mean, sometimes stuff comes in over time and we sort things out later. We had early on in the telecommunications sector a software-defined networking effort, a network function virtualization orchestration effort, a whole bunch of stuff.
1:26:12all separate entities. And they, I was like, let's just bring all these things together because the technology is now mature. We're taking all this money in, but we don't really need the resources anymore because the market's already mature. And so it took me a year to get all these companies to decide to bring all these things together and not pay all these separate fees and have all these separate orgs. I have a little folder in my inbox that says, you know, convincing people not to give me money. But in this world, I think it's a different kind of audience. I think it's narrow enough. I think it's specific enough to agents where it merits its own entity.
1:26:49I think as well it dovetails somewhat with the earlier thought, like with the tastemaking aspect to this. For these organizations to be effective, they really need a focus, like something that brings them together. And ultimately, like you can imagine an alternative where we snowball and there's only the Linux Foundation. as this Uber do everything remotely connected to a computer. And that wouldn't be that effective. So there's a taste-making here as well, which is going to be focused on the genetic systems and how they connect together, hence the Gender KI Foundation. But everything's about growth and evolution, so there's a possibility that later down the line we recognize some natural affinity.
1:27:28There's something new, something old, and then they can be brought together. But the focus helps at the beginning, certainly. what's gonna be the actionable outcomes so obviously you have the funds to direct uh i know a lot of the linux foundation does events there's also like eventually like certification things like that yeah what's the split of the foundation investments is a lot of it going back to uh different projects individually is it about the community building and then from people that have not been involved from the outside it's like this just seems like a nice blog post and a bunch your bloggers, but like in reality, how are things going to be actioned?
1:28:05Yeah. I mean, 50 companies coming in to fund a bunch of blog posts seems like overkill. Right. Exactly. So I think there's a couple of things. One, the intellectual property assets now are owned by this entity. That entity is responsible for making sure that, you know, that IP is managed effectively, that licenses are complied with, that intellectual property problems are dealt with. Some funding goes to that. There's a leadership function where, you know, to help bring consensus across the industry and within developer communities, you have to have a special kind of someone to do that. And I think they need to be technically knowledgeable, but humble enough to know that the community is the one who makes the technical decisions.
1:28:51So kind of just, you know, to sort of lead through influence to kind of help people organize things effectively. So you hire some people to do that. You hire people to do like developer outreach, community engagement, because you want more developers coming into the community. So funding to go to that. And then there's a huge convening function. The Linux Foundation hosts 50 ,000 plus virtual meetings a year. So we have this like, I think we're probably like one of the largest users of Zoom. I know for sure we're the largest Slack user in the world. And so that convening function is critically important.
1:29:30Make it as seamless and easy as possible to convene. And then, yeah, we hold events because I think, you know, to your point, developer engagement, face-to-face, being the town square where you physically get together means something. So I think you guys have been to KubeCon. We have easily 10 ,000 people that come to that conference twice a year. In Europe this summer, there were 13 ,000 folks there who come in and they exchange ideas. The core maintainers get together and make real decisions. and then the last thing we spend resources on and you can go even just check these out for some of our other projects is we have a whole platform that enables maintainers to look at their community and understand what's our velocity?
1:30:20How many developers are we adding? What's the social media scuttlebutt around this project? What are leading indicators of adoption? How's our security doing? Like, you know, do we have good practices about application security? And those are all things that we, you know, invest in to help make these communities, you know, better commercially adopted so that we get that positive feedback loop of like adoption that gets more investment in the form of developers providing input and that virtuous cycle kicks off. That's where the funding goes for these kind of things. I put in that question into our doc because it says it's a directed fund.
1:30:58And so my cheeky question was, well, what are you directing them to? So, yeah, I mean, it's kind of, so Directive Fund gets into, like, the nerdiness of this. Yeah, so, but it's, the reason we structure it that way is somebody has to own everything. The Linux Foundation is actually the ownership vehicle. And remember, we separate technical governance from the governance of actually how money gets spent. because we don't want this sort of pay-to-play aspect of technology that tends to screw everything up. And so the directed fund is really like real stakeholders who really care about this tech, put money in, and use it in a way to help build the market and the community and all the things I just talked about, and just let developers do what they're super good at, get together, solve tough problems, be tastemakers.
1:31:48That's something that we separate. Right. Yeah, I think there's a great essay by Rich Hagey who created Closure about open source. It's not about you. Just because something in open source, I don't know, to respond to your issue and to pull requests. And I think some of the worries sometimes that people have about the groups is like, well, you know, if not, you're a part of this thing. Am I supposed to also listen to your thing and implement the thing that you said? So I think that's going to be a super interesting thing in a technology that is so new. So, you know, I feel like everybody, because there's so much venture money in like early stage companies and like, obviously the foundation model labs have raised so much money that they need to be on top of it.
1:32:26There's a lot more pressure, I think, from the community to try and be a part of it and like put their stake and be like, yeah, we've contributed that or whatnot. So I just think it's like a unique compared to like the CNCF, for example, where the hyperscalers are kind of like around the clouds and we all know what those workloads look like. And like nobody's really trying to influence. There's not like a OpenAI preferred thing versus like an Anthropic preferred thing. But it wasn't always so. So when we started CNCF, I got a call from, I think it was Urs Holtzel and Brian Stevens, who were over at Google.
1:32:57It was 2014, I want to say. And, you know, they're competing. Well, they weren't even competing. They weren't in the cloud business. And they wanted to be in that business. Amazon was, you know, hosting virtual machines on EC2, and they were the de facto leader. They said, we will give away Kubernetes, which was kind of the Borg, and they renamed it Kubernetes, to the Linux Foundation. And because we've never run a virtual machine, we think containers are a better way to scale cloud applications. We'll give you this tech, and it'll be helpful to us if the entire industry adopts containers and Kubernetes as the way to build and deploy applications.
1:33:36So that was the strategy out of Google, and they contributed some serious IP that we all know today is awesome. But at the time, remember, Mesos was still a thing. Like PaaS was still a thing, right? Like, you know, Heroku, Cloud Foundry, even OpenStack, like virtual machines were still kind of a thing. So it wasn't clear what the abstraction layer for cloud computing was. But once the market started sort of piling on to Kubernetes, you know, like, oh, now Microsoft joined Cloud Native Computing Foundation. They're investing in Kubernetes and creating Kubernetes services. Oh, wait, Amazon's now investing in this?
1:34:16Then the consensus was really coming and built up here. I think there's a somewhat similar situation here with the caveat of saying like 10 times faster. Right. Like just day one, so much momentum around MCP, so much interest in this. And then also 10 years of CNCF to sort of teach the developer community and the vendor community how to do this well, where, you know, investment is not mutually exclusive to great technical outcomes, I think has been super positive. So I think this is going to move super fast. Awesome. We don't want to keep you guys too long. I'm sure you've been on a media tour this week.
1:34:57What's maybe from each of you, like one thing you look forward in the new year from the foundation? So I don't really know what it's going to be looking like, but I really look forward to like the next step. Like as David mentioned, like it's being months of development and discussion or whatever to bring us to this. And there's this sense of, I guess, relief, achievement. It was like, you know, you made a foundation. We're collaborating. We created this open space. It's great. but the what next i'm super excited for the next technical contribution for the first aaf event or night or conference or whatever form that ends up taking because there's another world where like bodies and foundations are created and then like eventually they get forgotten and this is not that this is really a beginning and so i want to see it be healthy and grow and i just don't know what comes next so i'm most excited to see that in the new year yeah i think you're most excited like if i really take a neutral look at like what just happened in the industry was creating this it's like you have google microsoft amazon um uh blog bloomberg cloud fair open air anthropic just a platinum member create a foundation i think it's just like this is actually quite quite cool and quite substantial and now it's just like now we're at this like starting point of like what can we do with this and and to nick's point we don't i think there's a lot of like things we don't know yet and like things we need to figure out like for anthropic this is the first big foundation um we're recreating and we have to learn a lot here um but i think it's just a such an interesting like starting point and i'm just super excited for these like new uh when you when you start something new like what you can build with it and it's it's in a way of building something that i'm not familiar with so i'm super excited to learn about this and seeing what we can do with with this like I feel like quite unique vehicle now and like really driving the agentic like AI open source community forward and focusing on what we're some of these companies who are very competitive with each other have coming around and where we can build things together that is just benefiting and uplifting every user in the market and every developer in the market every builder in the market significantly that's what I'm really excited about to see I definitely agree with both.
1:37:16I think there's a lot of like opportunity to figure out what the structure does. But let me give you something more specific that I think is like already in coming up, which is I want to see how agents become asynchronous. And I'm really tired of like reading through chat sessions. And I want this to be a thing where I can go have like 20 agents working for me and actually see that come together. So I think that MCP is starting to like approach that answer. And then we want to like figure out how to make those reference implementations and show people how they can actually get like another order of magnitude out of what AI can do for them.
1:37:51You don't enjoy pressing yes every five? The approve every three seconds. Bypass, bypass. Dangerously skip permissions. Yeah, turn it off. I'm with you on that one. I think what I look forward to is, you know, the success stories of, you know, the organization that's implemented agentic technology in that way and hearing how it really impacted their business. I'm looking forward to stories about MCP startups that made a ton of money. I'm looking forward to stories like in CNCF this year. CVS Pharmacy joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a pharmacy company that's really a user and adopter of technology, sort of the late majority.
1:38:41I think we're going to start seeing organizations really, really use this tech impactfully, provide feedback back to the community. And like it just the potential of the technology. I don't need to tell this crowd how huge it is, but we'll start to see that truly manifest. That is going to be cool. Well, thank you all so much for joining and congrats on the launch. Thank you. Thanks for giving us.
1:39:12Thank you.
From the publisher
One year ago, Anthropic launched the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—a simple, open standard to connect AI applications to the data and tools they need. Today, MCP has exploded from a local-only experiment into the de facto protocol for agentic systems, adopted by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Block, and hundreds of enterprises building internal agents at scale. And now, MCP is joining the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, alongside Block's Goose coding agent, with founding members spanning the biggest names in AI and cloud infrastructure.
We sat down with David Soria Parra (MCP lead, Anthropic), Nick Cooper (OpenAI), Brad Howes (Block / Goose), and Jim Zemlin (Linux Foundation CEO) to dig into the one-year journey of MCP—from Thanksgiving hacking sessions and the first remote authentication spec to long-running tasks, MCP Apps, and the rise of agent-to-agent communication—and the behind-the-scenes story of how three competitive AI labs came together to donate their protocols and agents to a neutral foundation, why enterprises are deploying MCP servers faster than anyone expected (most of it invisible, internal, and at massive scale), what it takes to design a protocol that works for both simple tool calls and complex multi-agent orchestration, how the foundation will balance taste-making (curating meaningful projects) with openness (avoiding vendor lock-in), and the 2025 vision: MCP as the communication layer for asynchronous, long-running agents that work while you sleep, discover and install their own tools, and unlock the next order of magnitude in AI productivity.
We discuss:
The one-year MCP journey: from local stdio servers to remote HTTP streaming, OAuth 2.1 authentication (and the enterprise lessons learned), long-running tasks, and MCP Apps (iframes for richer UI)
Why MCP adoption is exploding internally at enterprises: invisible, internal servers connecting agents to Slack, Linear, proprietary data, and compliance-heavy workflows (financial services, healthcare)
The authentication evolution: separating resource servers from identity providers, dynamic client registration, and why the March spec wasn't enterprise-ready (and how June fixed it)
How Anthropic dogfoods MCP: internal gateway, custom servers for Slack summaries and employee surveys, and why MCP was born from "how do I scale dev tooling faster than the company grows?"
Tasks: the new primitive for long-running, asynchronous agent operations—why tools aren't enough, how tasks enable deep research and agent-to-agent handoffs, and the design choice to make tasks a "container" (not just async tools)
MCP Apps: why iframes, how to handle styles and branding, seat selection and shopping UIs as the killer use case, and the collaboration with OpenAI to build a common standard
The registry problem: official registry vs. curated sub-registries (Smithery, GitHub), trust levels, model-driven discovery, and why MCP needs "npm for agents" (but with signatures and HIPAA/financial compliance)
The founding story of AAIF: how Anthropic, OpenAI, and Block came together (spoiler: they didn't know each other were talking to Linux Foundation), why neutrality matters, and how Jim Zemlin has never seen this much day-one inbound interest in 22 years
—
David Soria Parra (Anthropic / MCP)
MCP: https://modelcontextprotocol.io
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/david-soria-parra-4a78b3a
https://x.com/dsp_
Nick Cooper (OpenAI)
X: https://x.com/nicoaicopr
Brad Howes (Block / Goose)
Goose: https://github.com/block/goose
Jim Zemlin (Linux Foundation)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zemlin/
Agentic AI Foundation
https://agenticai.foundation
Chapters
00:00:00 Introduction: MCP's First Year and Foundation Launch
00:01:17 MCP's Journey: From Launch to Industry Standard
00:02:06 Protocol Evolution: Remote Servers and Authentication
00:08:52 Enterprise Authentication and Financial Services
00:11:42 Transport Layer Challenges: HTTP Streaming and Scalability
00:15:37 Standards Development: Collaboration with Tech Giants
00:34:27 Long-Running Tasks: The Future of Async Agents
00:30:41 Discovery and Registries: Building the MCP Ecosystem
00:30:54 MCP Apps and UI: Beyond Text Interfaces
00:26:55 Internal Adoption: How Anthropic Uses MCP
00:23:15 Skills vs MCP: Complementary Not Competing
00:36:16 Community Events and Enterprise Learnings
01:03:31 Foundation Formation: Why Now and Why Together
01:07:38 Linux Foundation Partnership: Structure and Governance
01:11:13 Goose as Reference Implementation
01:17:28 Principles Over Roadmaps: Composability and Quality
01:21:02 Foundation Value Proposition: Why Contribute
01:27:49 Practical Investments: Events, Tools, and Community
01:34:58 Looking Ahead: Async Agents and Real Impact




