Glossary
What is the
Model Context Protocol?
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open communication standard that defines how AI agents discover and invoke tools, capabilities, and external services during execution. Released by Anthropic in late 2024, MCP standardizes the message format between an agent host and any conforming server, replacing the previous pattern of building a custom integration for every tool, data source, or capability an agent might need. At its core, MCP establishes a host-client-server architecture: the agent host manages the active model session, MCP clients translate tool calls into protocol messages, and MCP servers expose discrete capabilities through a stable interface. Because the protocol is open, any developer can build an MCP server for a new tool, and any agent product that supports MCP can consume it immediately without custom SDK work. This makes MCP a connectivity standard rather than a capability runtime. It defines how agents talk to tools, not what those tools can actually do. The what is the responsibility of the tool layer — the capability runtime — that sits behind the protocol.
Why it matters
MCP changes the economics of tool integration for agent developers. Before MCP, adding a capability to an agent required a custom integration with per-provider authentication, error handling, and response parsing. With MCP, any capability exposed through a conforming server becomes immediately accessible to every agent that supports the standard. This shifts the integration surface from per-tool work to per-server work, and a growing community of MCP server authors does much of that work publicly. The result is that developers who adopt MCP early gain access to an expanding ecosystem of tools without incremental integration cost.
For teams using AnyCap, MCP and the capability runtime operate at different layers. MCP is the communication protocol — it standardizes how the agent calls the runtime. AnyCap is the capability runtime — it provides the actual capabilities (image generation, video generation, image understanding, video analysis, web search, and others) that the protocol routes requests to. These are not competing choices. A team uses MCP as the wire and AnyCap as what runs on that wire. The skill file install path gives the agent the instruction layer it needs to connect the two.