Anthropic's Model Context Protocol Crosses 97 Million Installs — Becomes Core AI Agent Infrastructure

Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) crossed 97 million installs in March 2026.

What MCP is

MCP is an open standard defining how AI models connect to external tools, databases, and APIs. Write once, works with any MCP-compatible AI model.

Universal adoption

Every major AI provider now ships MCP-compatible tooling: OpenAI, Google, xAI, Mistral, and others. Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and other AI coding tools use MCP as their primary tool-connection mechanism.

Why 97M matters

At 97 million installs, MCP has achieved infrastructure-level adoption — comparable to how REST APIs became the default for web services. This is the de facto standard for AI-to-tool communication.