Origin and Governance

MCP was open-sourced by Anthropic in November 2024 as a specification + reference implementations. Within a year it had been adopted by Microsoft (VS Code, GitHub Copilot), Google (Gemini Code Assist), JetBrains (AI assistant), and dozens of independent client and server implementations. Adoption that fast happens because the protocol solves a real problem and because the governance model invites contribution.

The protocol lives at modelcontextprotocol.io. The spec is versioned by date (currently 2025-11-25); the reference SDKs (Python, TypeScript, C#, Java) are maintained on GitHub under the modelcontextprotocol organization. Anthropic ships changes through the public spec process — proposals, RFC-style discussion, then a published revision — rather than as private API drift.

This matters because protocols only work when the rules are predictable. A protocol whose owner can ship breaking changes overnight is, in practice, just a private API. MCP's date-versioned revisions, deprecation windows, and capability-negotiated handshake (see next lesson) are the ceremonies that turn it from "Anthropic's tool spec" into something you can build on.

Code

Pinning a revision in your client/server·python

# Both sides advertise the revision they understand at handshake time.
# The server picks the highest revision both sides know.
from mcp.server.lowlevel import Server

app = Server("my-server", version="1.0.0")
# The SDK negotiates protocolVersion on initialize automatically.
# In your tests, assert the negotiated version matches what you expect.

Code

External links

Exercise

Progress

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