Anthropic's new Model Context Protocol In 2 Minutes

Anthropic have released a new open standard for connecting "AI assistants to the systems where data lives".

It's a JSON-RPC-based protocol that lets an LLM (in this case, Claude) communicate with a long-running server. Claude can request what different tools are available to use, and then call them.

There's a TypeScript and Python SDK, meaning you can easily create your own MCP servers to connect to your own data sources, or perform custom actions.