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What MCP Servers Do and How AI Apps Connect to Them

MCP gives AI applications a common way to connect to external systems. Learn how hosts, clients, servers, tools, resources, and prompts fit together—and why local and remote deployments have different requirements.
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The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open-source standard that gives AI applications a common way to connect to external systems. An AI application acts as the host, uses MCP clients to connect to MCP servers, and can use the capabilities those servers expose—such as retrieving information or invoking an action.

What MCP is—and what it is not

MCP standardizes how an AI application can discover and use capabilities provided by other software. The Model Context Protocol’s official documentation describes it as an open-source standard for connecting AI applications to external systems. Those systems might include data sources or software that performs a task.

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MCP is an interoperability layer, not the connected database, business service, or tool itself. A server implements the protocol and presents selected capabilities backed by an external system or function. What an application can do depends on what the server offers and what the application supports.

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How an MCP host, client, and server fit together

The roles form a chain: a person uses an AI application, the application connects through an MCP client, and that client communicates with an MCP server. The host is the application; the client manages a connection to a server; and the server implements MCP and makes capabilities available.

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  1. Host: The AI application the person uses.
  2. Client: The component in the host that connects to an MCP server.
  3. Server: The program that implements MCP and exposes capabilities backed by a system, data source, or function.

A host can connect to one or more servers. For example, a database-related server could provide a tool for querying the database, a resource containing its schema, and a prompt with reusable examples for working with the tools. These capabilities can complement one another, but a server does not have to provide all three.

What an MCP server can expose

Tools: actions an application can invoke

Tools are callable actions. Depending on the server, a tool might retrieve information or change something in the connected system. A tool’s availability does not mean every MCP application can invoke it, or that invoking it is automatically safe; the host and server determine how the capability is presented and handled.

Resources: information made available as context

Resources expose data or other context that an application can use. In the database example, a schema could be offered as a resource to help the application understand the structure of the data it is working with.

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Prompts: reusable interaction templates

Prompts provide reusable templates for tasks or interactions. A server might offer examples or a prepared workflow for interacting with its tools.

Local and remote MCP servers: different operating choices

Local and remote deployments differ in where the server runs, how the client communicates with it, how credentials are provided, and what network and scaling arrangements are needed. The authorization guidance also depends on the transport.

Consideration Local server using STDIO Remote server using HTTP
Where it runs Runs locally in the user’s environment. Runs as a remote service reached over HTTP.
Transport STDIO. HTTP; the current MCP guidance says HTTP implementations should follow MCP’s HTTP authorization framework.
Credential handling The MCP specification says STDIO implementations should retrieve credentials from the environment, rather than apply the HTTP authorization framework. Use the HTTP authorization framework specified by MCP. The client and server may negotiate custom authentication and authorization strategies.
Network exposure and operations Does not require exposing the server as a remote HTTP service; operational details still depend on the host and local setup. Requires operating a remote HTTP service and making authorization choices appropriate to that service. The specification’s transport guidance is not a blanket safety guarantee.
Scaling and routing Scaling across service instances is not the central deployment model described here. The July 28, 2026 release notes describe requests that can reach an instance behind a round-robin load balancer without shared protocol-level session storage. Services that need state across calls can pass an explicit handle between calls.

These are implementation choices, not a ranking of which approach is safer. Protocol conformance alone does not establish that a particular deployment is secure. Credential management and authorization remain responsibilities of the implementation, and the applicable MCP guidance differs between STDIO and HTTP.

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What changed in the July 28, 2026 MCP revision

MCP evolves, so implementation guidance written for an earlier revision may describe mechanics that have since changed. The official specification and release notes revised on July 28, 2026 describe a protocol that no longer uses the initialize/initialized exchange or the Mcp-Session-Id header.

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Instead, each request carries protocol and client metadata in _meta. A client may also use server/discover to query server capabilities, but discovery is optional. Applications and servers should not assume that every client supports every capability.

Details for implementers

  • The updated request flow supports multi-round-trip calls, including a server requesting additional input during a call.
  • Streamable HTTP requests include Mcp-Method and Mcp-Name headers, which infrastructure can use for routing or metering.
  • Responses to list and read operations carry ttlMs and cacheScope so clients can make caching decisions.
  • For remote deployments behind round-robin load balancing, the release notes say requests can be served by different instances without shared protocol-level session storage. If an application needs state to span calls, it can pass an explicit handle between them.

These are version-specific mechanics, not assumptions to apply to every existing MCP integration. Check the specification revision supported by the host and server when building or migrating a connection.

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Who originated MCP, and who stewards it?

Anthropic announced MCP as open source on November 25, 2024. Its announcement introduced the protocol alongside specifications, SDKs, local Claude Desktop support, and example servers.

In December 2025, Anthropic announced that it was donating MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI. Anthropic described the stewardship arrangement as community-driven, with maintainers continuing to prioritize community input and transparent decisions.

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That same December 2025 announcement reported more than 10,000 active public MCP servers and more than 97 million monthly SDK downloads across Python and TypeScript. These are figures Anthropic reported in 2025; they are not independently audited here and should not be read as verified 2026 totals.

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