Model Context Protocol

97 million monthly SDK downloads and more than 10,000 active servers in a year: that is the adoption figure attached to Model Context Protocol, the open standard that binds an agent to its tools and data. Didier Girard's August 2026 note draws the line that keeps getting blurred: MCP connects an agent to its tools, Agent Client Protocol connects a client to an agent, and the two stack.

The same wiring turns up at every scale. Artem Zhutov reaches QMD through an MCP server; Aristidis Vasilopoulos retrieves a 34-document knowledge base the same way; Pasquale Pillitteri's SEO loop pulls Search Console, Ahrefs and GA4 data through it, and he treats MCP as a layer over those tools. Thomas Kurian's Gemini agent, presented on 8 October 2026, gets its tool registry by connecting to any MCP server. Google's Agent Plugins 1.0.0 declares servers in mcp.json with an explicit type per entry (stdio, Streamable HTTP, historical HTTP+SSE), which removes transport inference; Anthropic, author of the two packaged components, is absent from the maintainer list.

Anthropic's own November 2025 report shows the other face. A Chinese state-sponsored group reached web search, data retrieval, password crackers and network scanners through MCP, and the AI executed 80-90% of the campaign. Janakiram MSV adds that MCP and its peers supply nearly every primitive except lifecycle: versioning, promotion, rollback. Whoever owns the agent control plane will define what an agent is.