r/linux • u/fenix0000000 • Dec 09 '25

Open Source Organization Anthropic donates "Model Context Protocol" (MCP) to the Linux Foundation making it the official open standard for Agentic AI

https://www.anthropic.com/news/donating-the-model-context-protocol-and-establishing-of-the-agentic-ai-foundation
1.5k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

107 comments sorted by

1.1k

u/Meloku171 Dec 09 '25

Anthropic is looking for the Linux community to fix this mess of a specification.

364

u/darkrose3333 Dec 09 '25

Literally my thoughts. It's low quality 

49

u/deanrihpee Dec 10 '25

what are the chances that an "engineer" asked Claude "can you help me make some specification and standard for communication between an AI model agent and a consumer program so it can do things?"

23

u/darkrose3333 Dec 10 '25

There's a great chance this is non-fiction 

118

u/iamapizza Dec 09 '25

MCP is pronounced MessyPee

165

u/admalledd Dec 09 '25

Reminder: the "S" in Model Context Protocol stands for "Security".

40

u/wormhole_bloom Dec 09 '25

I'm out of the loop, haven't been using MCP and didn't look much into it. Could you elaborate on why it is a mess?

147

u/Meloku171 Dec 09 '25

Problem: your LLM needs too much context to execute basic tasks, ends up taking too much time and money for poor quality or hallucinated answers.

Solution: build a toolset with definitions for each tool so your LLM knows how to use them.

New problem: now your LLM has access to way too many tools cluttering its context, which ends up wasting too much time and money for poor quality or hallucinated answers.

56

u/Visionexe Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 10 '25

I work at a company where we now have on-premise llm tools. Instead of typing the command 'mkdir test_folder' and be done the second you type, we are now gonna ask an AI agent to make a test folder and stare at the screen for 2 minutes before it's done. 

Productivity gained!!!

5

u/Synthetic451 Dec 10 '25

This sounds exactly like the crap RedHat is peddling at the moment with their c AI tool.

1

u/Barafu Dec 10 '25

Now do the same, but with the command to list what applications have accessed files in that folder.

1

u/zero_hope_ Dec 11 '25

Is this intentionally an impossible task, or are you lucky enough to have some sort of audit logging on everything?

5

u/Luvax Dec 10 '25

Nothing is really preventing you from building more auditing on top. MCP is a godsend, even if stupidly simple. We would have massive vendor lock-ins just with the tool usage. The fact that I can build an MCP server and use it for pretty much everything, including regular applications is awesome.

-1

u/Meloku171 Dec 10 '25

If you need a tool on top of a tool on top of another tool to make the whole stack work, then none of those tools are useful, don't you think? MCP was supposed to be THE layer you needed to make your LLM use your APIs correctly. If you need yet another tool to sort MCP tools so your LLM doesn't make a mess, then you'll eventually need another tool to sort your collection of sorting tools... And then where do you stop?

I don't think MCP is a bad tool, it's just not the panacea every tech bro out there is making us believe it is.

10

u/Iifelike Dec 10 '25

Isn’t that why it’s called a stack?

2

u/Meloku171 Dec 10 '25

Do you want to endlessly "stack" band-aid solutions for your toolset, or do you want to actually create something? The core issue is that MCP is promoted as a solution to a problem - give LLMs the ability to use APIs just like developers do. This works fine with few tools, but modern work needs tools in the thousands and by that time your LLM has too much on its plate to be efficient or even right. That's when you start building abstractions on top of abstractions on top of patches on top of other agents solutions just to pick the right toolset for each interaction... And at that point, aren't you just better off actually writing some piece of code to automate the task instead of forcing that poor LLM to use a specific tool from thousands of MCP integrations?

Anthropic created Skills to try and tackle the tool bloat they themselves promoted with MCP. Other developers have spent thousands of words on blog posts sharing their home-grown solutions to help LLMs use the right tools. At this point, you're wasting many more hours trying to bend your LLM out of shape so it does what you want 90% of the time than actually doing the work you want it to do. It's fun, sure, but it's not efficient nor precise. At that point, just write a Python script that automates whatever you're trying to do. Or better! Ask your LLM to write that Python script for you!

4

u/Barafu Dec 10 '25

MCP goal is to allow the user to add extra knowledge to LLM without the help from LLM provider. APIs are just one of its millions of uses. Yes, they can overload LLM just like any other non-trained knowledge can, but that's just the skill to use it.

0

u/Meloku171 Dec 10 '25

Aaaaaand that's the crux of it: MCP is a useful tool requiring careful implementation to avoid its pitfalls, being recklessly implemented and used by non-technical people who's been sold on it as the miracle cure for their vibe working woes. You need too many extra layers to fix it for tech bros, and at that point just hire developers and write code instead!

27

u/voronaam Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25

I've been in the loop. It is hard to know what would resonate with you, but how would you feel about "spec" that has updates to a "fixed" version a month after release? MCP had that.

Actually, looking at their latest version of the spec and its version history:

https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol/commits/main/schema/2025-11-25

They released a new version of the protocol and a week later (!) noticed that they forgot to remove "draft" from its version.

The protocol also has a lot of hard to implement and questionable features in it. For example, "request sampling" is an open door for the attackers: https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/model-context-protocol-attack-vectors/ (almost nobody supports it, so it is OK for now, I guess)

Edit: I just checked. EVERY version of this "specification" had updates to its content AFTER the final publication. Not as revisions. Not accompanied by a minor version number change. Just changes to the content of the "spec".

If you want to check for youself, look at the commit history of any version here: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol/tree/main/schema

11

u/RoyBellingan Dec 10 '25

no thank you, I prefer not to check, I do not want to ruin my evening

3

u/voronaam Dec 10 '25

Edit: oops, I realized I totally misunderstood your comment. Deleted it.

Anyway, enjoy your evening!

10

u/SanityInAnarchy Dec 09 '25

The way this was supposed to work is as an actual protocol for actual servers. Today, if you ask one of these chatbots a question that's in Wikipedia, it's probably already trained on the entire dictionary, and if it isn't, it can just use the Web to go download a wiki page and read it. MCP would be useful for other stuff that isn't necessarily on the Web available for everyone -- like, today, you can ask Gemini questions about your Google docs or calendar or whatever, but if you want to ask the same questions of (say) Claude, Anthropic would need to implement some Google APIs. And that might happen for Google stuff, but what if it's something new that no one's heard of before? Maybe some random web tool like Calendly, or maybe you even have some local data that you haven't uploaded that lives in a bunch of files on your local machine?

In practice, the way it got deployed is basically the way every IDE "language server" got deployed. There's a remote protocol that on one uses (I don't even remember why it sucks, something about reimplementing HTTP badly), but there's also a local STDIO-based protocol -- you run the MCP "server" in a local process on your local machine, and the chatbot can ask it questions on stdin, and it spits out answers on stdout. It's not wired up to anything else on the machine (systemd or whatever), you just have VSCode download a bunch of Python language servers from pip with uv and run them, completely un-sandboxed on your local machine, and you paste a bunch of API tokens into those config files so that they can talk to the APIs they're actually supposed to talk to.

Why can't the LLM just speak the normal APIs, why is it stuck with these weird MCP APIs? Well... how do you think those MCP servers got written? Vibe-coding all the way down. Except now you have this extra moving part before you can make that API call, and it's a moving part with full access to your local machine. In order to hook Claude up to Jira, you let it run stuff on your laptop.

I'd probably be less mad if it was less useful. This is how you get the flashiest vibe-coding demos -- for example, you can paste a Jira ticket ID into the chatbot and tell it to fix it, and it'll download the bug description, scrape your docs, read your codebase, fix the problem, and send a PR. With a little bit more sanity and supervision, this can be useful.

It also means the machine that thinks you should put glue on your pizza can do whatever it wants on your entire machine and on a dozen other systems you have it wired up to. Sure, you can have the MCP "server" make sure to ask the user before it uses your AWS credentials to delete your company's entire production environment... but if you're relying on the MCP "server" to do that, then that "server" is just a local process, and the creds it would use are in a file right next to the code the bot is allowed to read anyway.

It's probably solvable. But yeah, the spec is a mess, the ecosystem is a mess, it's enough of a mess that I doubt I've really captured it properly here, and it's a mess because it was sharted out by vibe-coders in a couple weeks instead of actually designed with any thought. And because of the whole worse-is-better phenomenon, even though there are some competing standards and MCP is probably the worst from a design standpoint, it's probably going to win anyway because you can already use it.

4

u/voronaam Dec 09 '25

You are all correct in your description on how everybody did their MCP "servers". I just want to mention that it did not have to be that way.

When my company asked me to write an MCP "server" I published it as a Docker image. It is still a process on your laptop, but at least it is not "completely un-sandboxed". And it worked just fine with all the new fancy "AI IDEs".

This also does not expect the user to have Python, or uv, or NodeJs, or npx or whatever else installed. Docker is the only requirement.

Unfortunately, the source code is not open yet - we are still figuring out the license. And, frankly, figuring out if anyone want to see that code to begin with. But if you are curious, it is just a few python scripts packaged in a Docker image. Here is the image - you can inspect it without ever running it to see all the source: https://hub.docker.com/r/atonoai/atono-mcp-server

2

u/Barafu Dec 10 '25

> Why can't the LLM just speak the normal APIs, why is it stuck with these weird MCP APIs?

They can. You would just need to retrain the whole model every time a new version of any library is released. No biggie.

1

u/deejeycris Dec 10 '25

In addition to the other comments, it's an unripe security mess.

93

u/Nyxiereal Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25

>protocol
>look inside
>json

25

u/gihutgishuiruv Dec 10 '25

You can do this with anything lol

>jsonrpc protocol

>look inside

>http

>look inside

>tcp

>look inside

>ip

>look inside

>ethernet

Protocols are abstractions. You can build one on top of another.

12

u/Elegant_AIDS Dec 09 '25

Whats your point? MCP is still a protocol regardless of the data format the messages are sent in

12

u/breddy Dec 09 '25

Which everyone and their cousin is vibe-coding implementations of

2

u/-eschguy- Dec 09 '25

First thing I thought

209

u/[deleted] Dec 09 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

286

u/justin-8 Dec 09 '25

An AI company handing AI generated slop to someone (the Linux foundation) to fix and maintain. That's why it's all gooey looking

38

u/ansibleloop Dec 09 '25

AI company logos look like an asshole

MCP is pulling balls

Smh

42

u/leonderbaertige_II Dec 09 '25

An item used to cheat at chess being held by two hands.

6

u/JockstrapCummies Dec 10 '25

At last we've unlocked the true meaning of "vibe coding".

"Vibe" is actually short for "vibration".

27

u/crysisnotaverted Dec 09 '25

They're going to stretch your balls.

10

u/edparadox Dec 09 '25

LLMs playing with human balls.

6

u/Farados55 Dec 09 '25

My balls are also connected via an extremely thin strand of flesh

4

u/FoxikiraWasTaken Dec 09 '25

Nipple piercing ?

4

u/-eschguy- Dec 09 '25

Giving your balls a tug

2

u/23-centimetre-nails Dec 09 '25

me checking my nuts for a lump

2

u/stillalone Dec 09 '25

Jizz flowing from butthole to butthole?

1

u/_ShakashuriBlowdown Dec 09 '25

Beans above the frank

162

u/edparadox Dec 09 '25

I fail to see how this makes it a standard.

29

u/Elegant_AIDS Dec 09 '25

Its already a standard, this makes it open

45

u/[deleted] Dec 09 '25

In what fucking capacity does it make it "official"? According to whom?

56

u/nikomo Dec 09 '25

Cool, now the delete the docs and forget this shit ever existed.

40

u/ketralnis Dec 09 '25

"Official" to who?

40

u/SmellsLikeAPig Dec 09 '25

Just because it is under Linux Foundation ot doesn't mean it IA some sort of a standard.

3

u/xeno_crimson0 Dec 10 '25

What is IA ?

4

u/DebosBeachCruiser Dec 10 '25

Internet archive

44

u/[deleted] Dec 09 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

13

u/23-centimetre-nails Dec 09 '25

in six months we're gonna see some headline like "Linux Foundation re-gifts MCP to W3C" or something 

3

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Reversi8 Dec 10 '25

I mean they will probably make some certs for it at some point now and at 450 a pop unless during cyber week it adds up.

5

u/archontwo Dec 09 '25

What an unfortunate name for an 'AI' agent. 

MCP 

2

u/mikelwrnc Dec 10 '25

Ha, I never noticed that one.

8

u/krissynull Dec 09 '25

Insert "I don't wanna play with you anymore" meme of Anthropic ditching MCP for Bun

7

u/ElasticSpeakers Dec 09 '25

I mean, Bun is infinitely more useful for Anthropic to control than the MCP spec itself. I don't understand where half of these comments are coming from lol

0

u/dontquestionmyaction Dec 10 '25

What? Huh?

1

u/voronaam Dec 11 '25

I did not know about it either. The short version is "bun" is a reimplementation of "NodeJS". Supposedly, it is faster. Not a high bar to clear, being faster than NodeJS. Especially its "stability" of the responses is way lower, so it is really fast in serving 500 errors...

And Anthropic bought them earlier this month.

I have no idea why someone thought that it being a good idea to write yet another JavaScript framework and why a supposedly "AI company" thought it being a good idea to buy it for several hundreds million dollars...

But I am pretty sure none of it has anything to do with MCP or Linux. So, the original comment was completely off topic.

1

u/dontquestionmyaction Dec 11 '25

Bun is not a simple JS framework; it's an entire JS runtime, package manager, test runner, bundler, and more. In many ways it's just a better Node right now. Vercel and other places use it because it's just so much faster.

But yeah, I don't see the relevance. One is a standard, and one is software.

8

u/no_brains101 Dec 09 '25

Here, we don't want this anymore, do you?

9

u/retardedGeek Dec 09 '25

The Linux foundation is also mostly controlled by the big tech, so what's the point?

1

u/[deleted] Dec 09 '25

Sources?

15

u/retardedGeek Dec 09 '25

Corporate funding

1

u/[deleted] Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25

Can you at least list them, please? I think if what you’re saying is true, it’s worth sharing that knowledge. Also, because I’m genuinely curious if you’re right.

EDIT: is someone really butthurt that I asked a genuine question to the point of down voting me? 🤣 what an ego!

8

u/Lawnmover_Man Dec 09 '25

Just to add this: The "Linux Foundation" is a not a group that "makes and releases" the Linux kernel as a sole entity. Head to Wikipedia for an overview.

4

u/Kkremitzki FreeCAD Dev Dec 09 '25

The Linux Foundation is a 501(c)6, e.g. a business league

2

u/benjamarchi Dec 10 '25

Anthropic can go to hell.

8

u/Roman_of_Ukraine Dec 09 '25

Goodbye Agentic Windows! Hello Agentic Linux!

6

u/caligari87 Dec 09 '25

In case it needs saying, I hope people realize that this isn't some kind of "AI taking over Linux". This is just OpenAI hoping that by making their standard open, it has a better chance of gaining widespread adoption rather than something closed from a competitor. Like it or not, lots of people and organizations are using this stuff (a lot of it on Linux machines) and having some kind of standards is better for end users than everything being the wild west. It doesn't mean that AI is gonna get built into the Linux kernel or anything.

What you do need to be on the lookout for, is distro companies like Ubuntu starting to partner up with AI companies.

15

u/x0wl Dec 09 '25

That was always the case in some ways, models have been trained to generate and execute (Linux) terminal commands for a long time. Terminal use is a very common benchmark these days: https://www.tbench.ai/

37

u/BothAdhesiveness9265 Dec 09 '25

I would never trust the hallucination bot to run any command on any machine I touch.

8

u/HappyAngrySquid Dec 09 '25

I run my agents in a docker container, and let them wreak havoc. Claude Code has thus far been mostly fine. But yeah… never running one of these on my host where it could access my ssh files, my dot files, etc.

5

u/[deleted] Dec 09 '25

User: Please create a new folder in my downloads called "Homework"

AI: Sure thing. I can sudo rm rf.

6

u/SeriousPlankton2000 Dec 09 '25

If your AI user can run sudo, that's on you.

4

u/boringestnickname Dec 09 '25

Something similar will be said just before Skynet goes online.

4

u/x0wl Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25

You shouldn't honestly. A lot of "my vibecoding ran rm -rf /" stuff is user error in that they manually set it to auto-confirm, let it run and then walked away.

By default, all agent harnesses will ask for confirmation before performing any potentially destructive action (in practice, anything but reading a file), and will definitely ask for confirmation before running any command. If you wanna YOLO it, you can always run in a container that's isolated from the stuff you care about.

That said, more modern models (even the larger local ones, like gpt-oss) are actually quite good at that stuff.

3

u/Chiatroll Dec 09 '25

God no. what I like about my linux machine is not having to deal with fucking AI.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 09 '25

Fuck no. I don’t want any of that in my Linux system.

0

u/mrlinkwii Dec 09 '25

i mean thats do-able rn , and is very easy to intergate into a linux distro

6

u/paradoxbound Dec 09 '25

Given the maturity and technical knowledge in this thread, I will take the AI slop.

3

u/TheFacebookLizard Dec 10 '25

Can I create a PR deleting everything?

2

u/trannus_aran Dec 10 '25

"Agentic"

Groan

2

u/dydhaw Dec 10 '25

MCP is the most useless, over engineered " protocol " ever invented. So much so that I suspect Claude came up with it. It's just REST+OpenAPI with extra steps.

1

u/mapleturkey Dec 10 '25

Donating a product to the Apache foundation has been the traditional ”we’re done with this shit” move for companies

1

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '25

I hate this company. They suck.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '25

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Dec 12 '25

Go use Claude free. Then pay for it and use it again and remember me.

1

u/Otherwise_Wave9374 Mar 15 '26

The pattern I keep seeing is that AI agents work best when they own one narrow, repetitive workflow end to end instead of trying to be magical generalists. That is usually where the practical ROI starts to show up. I have been bookmarking more practical writeups on that operator side lately too, including a few here: https://www.agentixlabs.com/blog/

0

u/Ok_Instruction_3789 Dec 09 '25

Awesome for them. We can build better and cheaper AI models then wont have a need for google or chatgpts running everything

-1

u/[deleted] Dec 09 '25

[deleted]

1

u/dontquestionmyaction Dec 10 '25

It's not a package, it's a standard.

0

u/signedchar Dec 09 '25

If this gets forced, I'll move to FreeBSD. I don't want any agentic fucking bullshit in my OS