Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast - One Year of MCP — with David Soria Parra and AAIF leads from OpenAI, Goose, Linux Foundation

Episode Date: December 27, 2025

One year ago, Anthropic launched the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—a simple, open standard to connect AI applications to the data and tools they need. Today, MCP has exploded from a local-only experiment into the de facto protocol for agentic systems, adopted by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Block, and hundreds of enterprises building internal agents at scale. And now, MCP is joining the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, alongside Block’s Goose coding agent, with founding members spanning the biggest names in AI and cloud infrastructure.We sat down with David Soria Parra (MCP lead, Anthropic), Nick Cooper (OpenAI), Brad Howes (Block / Goose), and Jim Zemlin (Linux Foundation CEO) to dig into the one-year journey of MCP—from Thanksgiving hacking sessions and the first remote authentication spec to long-running tasks, MCP Apps, and the rise of agent-to-agent communication—and the behind-the-scenes story of how three competitive AI labs came together to donate their protocols and agents to a neutral foundation, why enterprises are deploying MCP servers faster than anyone expected (most of it invisible, internal, and at massive scale), what it takes to design a protocol that works for both simple tool calls and complex multi-agent orchestration, how the foundation will balance taste-making (curating meaningful projects) with openness (avoiding vendor lock-in), and the 2025 vision: MCP as the communication layer for asynchronous, long-running agents that work while you sleep, discover and install their own tools, and unlock the next order of magnitude in AI productivity.We discuss:* The one-year MCP journey: from local stdio servers to remote HTTP streaming, OAuth 2.1 authentication (and the enterprise lessons learned), long-running tasks, and MCP Apps (iframes for richer UI)* Why MCP adoption is exploding internally at enterprises: invisible, internal servers connecting agents to Slack, Linear, proprietary data, and compliance-heavy workflows (financial services, healthcare)* The authentication evolution: separating resource servers from identity providers, dynamic client registration, and why the March spec wasn’t enterprise-ready (and how June fixed it)* How Anthropic dogfoods MCP: internal gateway, custom servers for Slack summaries and employee surveys, and why MCP was born from “how do I scale dev tooling faster than the company grows?”* Tasks: the new primitive for long-running, asynchronous agent operations—why tools aren’t enough, how tasks enable deep research and agent-to-agent handoffs, and the design choice to make tasks a “container” (not just async tools)* MCP Apps: why iframes, how to handle styles and branding, seat selection and shopping UIs as the killer use case, and the collaboration with OpenAI to build a common standard* The registry problem: official registry vs. curated sub-registries (Smithery, GitHub), trust levels, model-driven discovery, and why MCP needs “npm for agents” (but with signatures and HIPAA/financial compliance)* The founding story of AAIF: how Anthropic, OpenAI, and Block came together (spoiler: they didn’t know each other were talking to Linux Foundation), why neutrality matters, and how Jim Zemlin has never seen this much day-one inbound interest in 22 years—David Soria Parra (Anthropic / MCP)* MCP: https://modelcontextprotocol.io* https://uk.linkedin.com/in/david-soria-parra-4a78b3a* https://x.com/dsp_Nick Cooper (OpenAI)* X: https://x.com/nicoaicoprBrad Howes (Block / Goose)* Goose: https://github.com/block/gooseJim Zemlin (Linux Foundation)* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zemlin/Agentic AI Foundation* https://agenticai.foundationFull Video EpisodeTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction: MCP's First Year and Foundation Launch00:01:17 MCP's Journey: From Launch to Industry Standard00:02:06 Protocol Evolution: Remote Servers and Authentication00:08:52 Enterprise Authentication and Financial Services00:11:42 Transport Layer Challenges: HTTP Streaming and Scalability00:15:37 Standards Development: Collaboration with Tech Giants00:34:27 Long-Running Tasks: The Future of Async Agents00:30:41 Discovery and Registries: Building the MCP Ecosystem00:30:54 MCP Apps and UI: Beyond Text Interfaces00:26:55 Internal Adoption: How Anthropic Uses MCP00:23:15 Skills vs MCP: Complementary Not Competing00:36:16 Community Events and Enterprise Learnings01:03:31 Foundation Formation: Why Now and Why Together01:07:38 Linux Foundation Partnership: Structure and Governance01:11:13 Goose as Reference Implementation01:17:28 Principles Over Roadmaps: Composability and Quality01:21:02 Foundation Value Proposition: Why Contribute01:27:49 Practical Investments: Events, Tools, and Community01:34:58 Looking Ahead: Async Agents and Real Impact This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Layton Space podcast. This is Alassio, Fundra Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swix, editor of Layden Space. Hey, and here we are joined finally in the studio for the first time. Welcome back, David, from Anthropics slash MCP. Yeah, hey. Well, nice to finally talk to you in Purt, then. Last time, like a year ago, it was over VC, and this is Wayfam. I watched it back.

It was eight months. It's been a crazy eight months. And I think we just celebrated, like, the one-year anniversary of MCP. Yes, we did. At least the public announcement. And also last night or yesterday was the agentic AI On the initial launch. Yeah, that was nice.

It was a nice event. It was nice to see the Anthropic office. Yeah. You like it? Yeah. It's very good food. I would say in terms of my food bench, Anthropic does rank over opening eye.

Yeah. At least that's what we have going for us. Awesome, man. Do you want to give just a quick overview of what's happening with MCP and now you're donating it to the foundation? and then we'll do kind of like a one-year recap of the protocol itself, and then we'll have the rest of the leads from the foundation join us to do more of the high level. Yeah, that sounds good.

Yeah, I mean, where we're at the moment, we have done like a year, like a year ago, we launched it, and then we had this like crazy adoption over the last year now, which it feels like an eternity, honestly. But we have this like crazy growth in like adoption, you know, through, initially through like Thanksgiving and Christmas, very early with a lot of like builders building MCP and then you know, you had like the first big clients

coming in like cursor and VS code and then like you had this like inflection point around April with like Sam Oldman and Satya and Sunder and all I'm posting about like MCP and that they're going to adopt MCP at Microsoft at Google at OpenEI and that was really like the big inflection point so yeah

but in all of the time you also had to do a lot of work on the protocol itself, right? We moved, we launched originally as like basically local only. We could like build local MCP servers for cloud desktop. But then we like in March this year, we moved into like how can you do remote MCP servers to connect like really about like to a remote server and introduced like the first iteration of authentication. And then in June we revisited that and like improved it quite a little bit so that it works

better for, you know, for enterprises in particular. And we were very, very lucky that in that time for March, like June, we were like able to like have absolute industry leading experts that literally work on Oath itself to help us with some of the pieces, right, and how to get it right. And then we focused a lot of, on like security best practices and this type of work. And now we like, I feel we have a really solid foundation and

we're doing, we just launched like in our. end of November, than the recent iteration of the protocol, finally, like, the next bigger improvement of the protocol, which is, like, long-running tasks to really allow for, like, you know, deep research type of task and, like, you know, maybe even agent-to-agent communication. And so I think we're just stepping into, like, this territory now with, like, okay, we have really solid foundations.

We have, like, one more big permit if you want to add. We want to make, like, a little bit more scalability. Things work. And then we're, you know, going to get into a phase where it, probably becomes a bit more stable. And so, yeah, it's been, it's been absolutely crazier, man. You did say the agent to agent, so there is a A2A protocol. I'm curious when a Gen.

TechA. Engineering Foundation got formed, or just a GenTICA Foundation, was there any discussion about any of these other protocols being a part of it? Or, you know, Sean wrote a post called YMCP1 already. One of my favorite post. Maybe it was already. And it was before, Seven, all the other guys. Yeah, yeah. You were right.

I mean, I think it was just obvious that was going to happen. Yeah. So we did, we of course have conversations around like what else was in the market, like the payment protocols that are interesting and so on. But when we wanted to start a foundation, we wanted to make sure, first of all, two things. We wanted to start small and make sure that the group that is founding this, like for us, it's the first time we have Anthropic have an open source foundation. So this is all new to us.

So we really want to start it small and making sure we're learning. along the ways and being able to like shepherd this in the way we feel it's best for the industry together with open the eye and block but the second part of that is also like we really felt like we wanted to see things that have

a lot of adoption or de facto like at least on the protocol side like a de facto standard and I don't think any of the other protocols it feels like they're not just there yet but of course if they get there then we're like super open as long as they're like

complementary to what's in the foundation. On the application side, we're a little bit more flexible and we're like more open, but on the protocol side, I think we really want to make sure that we're not like offering, like, the foundation doesn't encompass this like five protocols for the same like communication there. And so, yeah, there was discussion, but I think for now we just want to start a small. Is there a role, like a double hat that you have now with the foundation, or are you more focused on MCP?

I am still mostly focused on MCP. is a bit of a double hat. So there is just like, I think people need to understand like the foundation part is mostly just an umbrella to make sure the projects under it stay always neutral.

And I think that's really the most important part you want to get a lot, you know, want to understand because the rest of it is like, okay, how do we use the budget of the foundation for events and things that are like quite dry? And then the technical parts to like MCP,

they stay actually the same. Like on the way we govern MCP, nothing has really changed. And so that's really still my job as the lead core maintainer of like shepherding the process that is shepherding the protocol forward. And then beyond that, now the additional double role is like I'm also going to be on the technical steering committee of the foundation, which will like make sure to like figure out what are the projects we want in the foundation. So if someone comes with the project to us, the people that have projects in it will decide is this something we would want. Is this something that we feel is like well maintained, has a lot of adults. Topchan is not going to go away.

We want to make sure the foundations have like super interesting and important project and not like that dumping ground, like have, you know, some foundations might have ended up with. That's true. So we're going to meet some of the others later. But maybe we'll just focus back on the sort of MCP development. Yeah. You covered a lot. There's been four spec releases.

That's a lot. Yeah. So people may have missed some of them. That's what I'm saying, right? And I think it's really interesting how you're, we've covered. continue to work on really important parts. Like, I always think like it's very hard to follow up a major success with a sequel. Yeah.

Because the sequel usually, like, is hard to repeat that impact. But I think like every single time you've actually managed to like focus on something important. Yeah. So maybe we can cover, I guess, maybe we'll start with the March May one, which is HTTP streaming, which is good. And the off-spec, right? Any other, I don't know if you want to highlight any others, but we'll just catch people up on that stuff. Yeah, so that was, I think that was really a, that was such an important one. It was the number one requested thing.

Yeah, it was like, it really opened up this like remote thing. And we were, we already knew actually in December and November that the next big thing will be like, how can you do this over the, you're over remote. And authentication is quite important. One of the things I think people very rarely notice when it comes to MCP, MCP is very, very prescriptive in like each layer. Like other protocols are not like that. example. We like, you want to do authentication. If the client and the server don't know each other, you need to do all, right? And so we were very early, we wanted to have like one way to do something. And so we really focused on like, what does this mean? Like, how do we get it over? How do we build a protocol that has this like these streaming properties that we require? And then how do we do authentication very early? Authentication, in the first iteration, I think we did an okay job, but we got some aspects wrong. And most of them, honestly, were just me not understanding enterprises well enough. But then again, I think the strengths that we have with MCP, and I think the one thing, if anything I'm a proud of,

is like building a community of people that can come together and help me figure shit out. Because, you know, I have my set of experiences of what I'm good at. And enterprise authentication, it turns out is not one of them, right? But they're way better suited people for that. And so that's when we like, after that's March. I saw you post that, but I didn't really dig into the details. Was it like the typical Samo's Skype type of?

authentication issue? The main issue we did is in all there are two components. There is an authentication server who gives you the token and then there's the resource server. It takes the token and gives you the resource and return. And in the first iteration of our authenticated spec, we combined them together into the MCP server, which if you were building... Unusable, yeah. It's kind of usable if you build like an MCP server like as like a public server for You're a startup, you're building a server for yourself. You want to bind this to the accounts you already have. That is completely usable.

The reality in enterprises is you don't authenticate, you authenticate with some central entity. Like, you know, you have some IDP provider or an IDP. And you go to an L0.0.0. For most people, what they don't even notice that's happening. All they know is like, oh, in the morning, I'm going to go log in with Google for and they can access to all my work stuff. Right.

But that's effectively the IDP, right? And if you combine these into the same server, you just can't do this anymore. And so all we need is to do is like, okay, we are a resource server. The MSP server is a resource server, how you get the token from the authentication server. We have opinions on how you should do it,

but it's kind of separated. And that's what happened then in the June spec where we separated this out and worked through all of these like, okay, how do you do dynamic client registration and other aspects, which also were part of the March spec. We can talk about that. that's a whole other story of like we're actually pushing the boundaries of

what OOOF can do with MCP because we're trying something very unique with MCP but yeah that was that was the big part in March which we like and that was that authentication back to first iteration than fixing it in June. Yeah. Was it a state of agents

authenticating on my behalf? Because even today with the OAT I still have to log into linear and whatnot. Yeah. Walth itself is for the most part a very human centric protocol. It's It just tells you how you obtain a token if you don't have a token. Once you have a token, actually it doesn't matter. You just put it into the bearer token.

And so we're not very prescriptive of what like agent-to-agent authentication would look like or on behalf of agents. They are ideas that we are looking into, and I don't have all the specifics, but we're not prescriptive in the same way. We're prescriptive as with or us, but you can technically, it's the moment here you have a token that might be bound to like a workload identity or something like that. you just can pass that still to the MCP server. We're just not telling you how to obtain it just yet. And so we're not prescriptive.

And so people do this and they can do it, particularly when they're within like an enterprise and have a somewhat closed ecosystem. But if the client and the server don't know each other, we just don't have a good solution for now. And then, yeah, on the remote thing, you went from local servers like SSC and then streamable HTTP.

Any learnings you want to call out there? Any regrets or learnings for others? And transport. The one discussion that has never, stopped on the very beginning of the last years of our transport. And we literally just spent the last two days at the Google offices with a bunch of like senior engineers from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Anthropic, opening eye. It's just like, what do we need to do here to really, really make this solid?

When we looked into Mark, we wanted to get a transport going that basically retains a lot of the properties we had from standard I.O. because you really, and I still believe this until today, that MCP should also enable agents, and agents are inherently somewhat stateful, and there's some form of long-term communication going between the clients and the server. And so we always looked for something like that.

We also knew that we looked into alternatives, like, okay, what happens if we do web sockets, for example? And we have found a lot of issues with doing a proper bidirectional stream. And we were like, okay, what is the right middle ground between having something that can be used in the simplest form that people do, like where they just want to provide a tool, but then is able to be upgraded to like a full bidirectional stream

if you need it because you really have like complex agents communicating with each other. That's where streamable HTTP was born with that intent. And I think there's something that in retrospective we got right and something that we got wrong. I think we got right that we are really leaning just on standard HTTP in that regard. We get wrong that we made a little thing. things optional for the clients to do.

Like, you can, the client can connect and open this return stream from the server, but it doesn't have to. And the reality is, no client does it because it's optional. And so a lot of the bidirectionality goes away. And so features like elicitations and sampling are just not available to servers because they don't have that stream open because the client, the client implement was like, ah, that's the minimal viable project for me. I don't have to do it.

And so that became an issue. So I think there are lessons there. The second part of the lesson is that the way we designed the protocol, the transfer protocol, requires some form of holding state on the server side. And that is fine if you have one server, but the moment you scale those horizontally across multiple pods and in containers or something like that.

Well, now if you get like true call and then a licitation and the recitation result, you somehow require to like, you might hit two, different servers and you need to find a way to have these two servers somehow get this result together and you effectively need some form of shared like the Redis, Memcash, whatever you want, like some form usually pops up or something like that. You want to have like a shared state that you can like have.

And that's kind of okay and like we have seen this in PHP application and Python application being done. But it's it's not fun if you do this at scale. And we know from like some companies like the Googles of the world. all the Microsoft of the world. They're doing MCP at a scale that, I can't tell you the numbers, but it's like in a million of requests.

And so now it becomes a problem, right? And so now we're sitting here like, okay, how do you build an iteration of the protocol that allows for basically these principles of like making as simple as possible for simple MCP servers, but allow this full spectrum of like really bi-directional streaming if you need it, but also make it scalable. And I think we're just allowed to find the right solutions,

but it's just complicated, yeah. Because a lot of the technology today is really just, it is very little like that. People either do the simple thing and then you do something like rest or you do like a full by the stream and then you're just going to do like web sockets or like GRPC and so on.

And we need kind of both. What does it like to be in that kind of meeting where you have all these impressive companies and everyone is senior and everyone has an opinion? That's much fun. Yeah, for high care, to work with some of the best engineers in the industry. Like, it's insane.

Okay, well, who decides, you know? Usually there's... We're trying to get to consensus. Like, the reality is technically I decide in the end of the day. But I think that's more like a formalism. In the end of the day, what you're trying to do is just to really narrow down of like,

what are the real problems which we all agree on? What are the things where we not necessarily agree on? And what are the, you know, and then within those bounds, built the best solution and it takes a while and it takes a lot of iterations. But it's so much, honestly, it's so much fun because you get to

see these unique problems from the companies. You see some of the identity of the companies in the problems themselves, right? Like, you know, Google has a different set of problems like in Microsoft and a lot of it comes from like just the ways of building things and then the problem from Anthropic look different from the problem from opening eye.

But what I love about all of this is that everybody is that like sometimes you step back You sit in a room with all these competitive companies, but you're actually building something together. And I love that. I've been in open source for like 25 years. Yeah, it's very much. A lot of this kind of stuff.

And when a standard works, this is the ideal. And these people are all amazing. I just learn from all my peers so much. I'm very grateful to be in the situation. Yeah. This reminds me of the IETF standards process. Is there some discussion about how this works as a private group versus something more traditional? It's an interesting one.

does look a little bit like the ITF. The ITF is slightly different. The ITF is like an open forum where everybody can go. And the result of that, it's like the ITF is very consensus based. And by accident, not by like, not necessarily because they want to be, but by accident quite slow in the processes, which is very good in many ways. It can be undone, right? Once it's opposite. Yeah. And like, for example, when you look at like the OLS 2.1 spec, it's been in the work for like three years or four years and they're just not done with it, right? And that's like, that's the length of which ITF standardization works.

Like, these things can take a long, long time. And I think that's good for certain pieces, but I think in the eye at the moment is just so more fast moving. You're somewhat forced to find a smaller group. And so that's why we run MCP as like a really traditional open source project with like a core maintainer group of like eight people that basically decide everything. And then like input from everybody else. We get input and people can make suggestions.

And we have a lot of the changes don't come from. the core maintainers, but they are the ones that decided. And that's like way more, it's like a middle ground of being somewhat consensus-based, but also somewhat like a bit of a dictatorship, which can be good if you want to move fast, which NCP wants to do at the moment. How do you balance the influence of like the model improvements with how to shape the protocol? Because obviously, you know, you have Anthropic and Open AI you guys are doing post-training on these models to make them better tool-calling and you have preferences on the shape of the protocol versus there's people that are not aware of like how you're structuring that.

So yeah, do you like share some of these? Like does the protocol influence some of the model post training or like vice versa? Maybe. I'm not 100% familiar. Like I'm a product person. I'm not fully familiar with everything we do on the research side for sure. But it influences the post training in the sense that we're making use of things like the MCP Atlas, that we are like having in our model card of like making sure that like we're taking this large.

set of tools in the wild and make sure that our models work with that. But I think the primitives of the protocol, they're actually very rarely influenced by model improvements. I think there's a sense that we do anticipate the exponential that the models are on in terms of improvement and that we're relying to some degree of mechanics that you can put into the model training. I'm going to get more concrete here. So for example, people have had long conversations around context build of MCP servers. And that happens because MCP opens up the door to a lot of tools. And if you naively take all the tools, throw them into the context window, you just get a lot of bloat. It would be the equivalent if you take all the skills, take all the mock-down files and just throw them all into the context.

You would also have a lot of bloat. But we already knew, and I think we always knew that you can do something like progressive discovery. That's like a general principle thing of like you can give the model some information and let the model then decide to gain more information, right? And of course here is where we're like, you know, some of the foresight that we see because we are the model companies, we know that we can train this if you wanted to. And what the training does is just optimizes it. The model can do it in principle already, right?

And any model can do it that does any type of tool calling. But if you train the model for it, it's just better at it, right? And so these things then go hand in hand in a way. But in the end of the general mechanic of progressive discovery or progressive discovery, that's just inherent to any type of model that can do any type of tool calling in the end of a day, if that makes sense.

Yeah. And I think the context fraud point is important. And I think down there's the MCP versus code mode. And then it's like, well, if Anthropic says code mode and Anthropic made MCP, maybe is that the best way? So the block was never actually called it a code mode? That's the Crowfair term.

That's it. But yeah, but like people call it, we call it, we call it, but in the end of the day, what it boils down to is just like,

okay, and here's the interesting part. Like, the, so first of all, MCP is a protocol between the AI application and like servers,

right? So the model is actually technically not involved in MCP. And so now you have an application go like, I have a bunch of tools. What can I do with it?

And you can do the naive thing and go like, okay, I have tools. I'll throw them into tools for the model and I, I call them, but you can be more creative with it.

You can go and like, okay, models are really good at writing code. What if I take this and treat it like API calls and you give it to the model and now the model generates, you know, code and what you effectively doing is this composability that the model would have done anyway by like call tool A, you know, get the result, go back to inference to call B and then combine it into call three. Now you're all you've done is you let the model optimize it in advance and put them into a bunch of code

that is just executed in a sandbox and go like, call one, put it into two, put the results into three, get a result, and all you've done is an optimization at the end of the day. But the benefits of MCP, of having authentication done for you, having something that is suited for the LLM, something that

is automatically that is discoverable and self-documenting. These thing has not gone away. That's still MCP for you, right? You're just using it at the different race. So I'm always a little bit confused when people go like, But MCPs, why does it tell me that that does it mean MCPs users? No, it's still just a different use, right? And I think you will see evolutions as we're getting better of how we use these models

and the infrastructure around it gets a bit more mature. And you suddenly can assume that most model, like, AI applications will have some form of like sandboxing for execution. You can do a lot more fun stuff like that. But I don't think that the value of like a protocol that connects the model to the outside world is gone because of it. That makes sense. I see it truly as an optimization.

Honestly, the token optimization. Is this a good time to bring up skills? Always. It's awesome. So we, skills is a more recent concept. Yeah. I only bring it up because it's mentally linked in my mind to progressive disclosure and to adding preset code, scripts and all that.

Skills can also create skills, which is very fun. Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people are trying to place MCP versus. skills, obviously they're not overlapping, but how do you view it? Yeah, I agree. I think that's the interesting part. They're not overlapping. I think they solve different things. I think skills are super great. And, you know, I think that the first that really like, they're being built from the principle is progressive discovery. But I think the mechanism of progressive discovery, that's just

universal to any type of thing you can do with the model. But what skills do, they like, they give you the domain knowledge for like a specific set of task, like how you are, how you behave, how should the model behave as a data scientist or how should the model this behave as, I know, an accountant or whatever, but MCP gives you the connectiveness of the actual actions that you can take with the outside world.

And so I think they're somewhat orthogonal in terms of like the skills really gives you this domain knowledge, just like kind of vertical and then like MCP gives you this horizontal of like, okay, you know, give me that one action. And of course, skills can take actions. They can take actions because you can have code, and strips in there.

And that's great, but it has two interesting aspects that I think people are. The first one is you need an execution environment. So you need to use the way to execute. Your machine, yeah. Yes. And that's perfectly fine for,

you know, if you run a local, like, cloud code or something, then we can talk about like CILIs, for example. In those scenarios where you have, like, an execution environment, these things make a lot of sense. And then it's great. Or if you have a remote execution environment,

then it makes a lot of sense. But you still don't get authentication in that regard And so what I think MCP brings is the authentication piece. It brings the piece that you don't have to, like an external person, like for example, if you have a linear MTP server, they can improve the server. You don't have to deal with that in your skill, right? It's not fixed in space. And then the third part is that you don't necessarily need an execution environment

because the execution environment is effectively somewhere else on the server. And so if you build a web application or like a mobile application, these things work better in some of these regards. So I think they are orthogonal in that regard for the most part. And I've seen some quite cool deployments where people use skills to explore of like different functions, different like, you know, the accountant, the engineer, the data scientists, and then use MCP server to connect these skills to the actual data sources within the company. And I think that's actually a really fun model.

And I think that's the closest how I think about this. Yeah, so MCP is the connectivity layer. I think it's the word that you choose. The communication layer. Communication layer. Yeah. So is it architecturally, I'm wondering if it's like the MCP's client inside of each skill, or is there a shared client that can discover skills?

We do that as a shared. We do that as a shared one. I think you technically want a bit more shared ones because you do, the more shared you have, the better, the more you can do like discovery things. You can do things like, okay, I have connection pooling. I can do automatic discovery of things. I can even like, you know, in a skill, you might just very loosely describe what you want.

And I can look into the registry that I have access to and get an MCP server for you, right? These things you can do, you can do when you do. But I think both works in the end of the day. Yeah, but this is things to experiment with. I do want to highlight for people who might have missed it. You say we do blah, blah, blah. actually I think nobody understands

enough how much anthropic dog foods MCP and I only understood this when I watched John Welsh do his talk at AIE where he was like yeah we have MCP gateway everything goes through this and like what can you say more about that?

Yeah I mean like you know we use those right we use a lot of like we use a lot of skills internally we use a lot of MCP search internally because like we have it obviously you know you want to make it very easy for people to deploy MCP you want to like have some form of like integration with you IDPs and so on. So we have a gateway that we've built custom purpose for ourselves

and you're just got to like deploy your MCP servers. It's all internal apps? It's all internal stuff. Yeah. Some of them are like external things like technically external things but in the lack of them offering a first party one we have our own. We have a Slack MCP server which I love to use that have cloud like summarized my Slack for me.

And so there's quite a lot of usage for that. Like we even have like an MCP server. We like we're doing like a semi, a bi-annual like survey, for example, around like how we feel like about the company, about the future, about AI, about safety, these type of things. And we have an MCP server for that, and I can ask

a lot of questions around the results, which is really fun. Is it your team maintaining it? No. We made in a gateway. But like I think one of the fun part is like when we started MCP, it was always like MCP before we even open source it, it was born out of the idea of like, I'm in a company that is growing crazy. I'm in the development side of things,

development tooling set of things, I will grow slower than the rest. How can I build something that they can all build for themselves? And that's really

the origin story of MCP. And so it's fun to see a year later, like that's what's actually going on. It's like people build MCP server for themselves.

I probably don't even know 90% of the MCP servers are anthropic because, you know, they might be in research and I might not even see them or I just don't know because people

build for themselves. But do they host it themselves? Is there a remote? They effectively have a command to launch it and it just launches in a QVus cluster for them. So it's like partially managed.

Yeah, that's good info for anyone at a large company to build. Yeah. Any platform infra. There are platforms that offer that to you for us from security perspective, we want to build these ourselves. Yeah. But they're like the person who built a fast MCP, Jeremiah, like a company that offers like Fast MCP Cloud,

which is a little bit like that. You're just like two Comerans and you have a running instance of an MCP, server that talks stream of HTTP and then a lot of enterprises use things like light LLM as a gateway and then they can even do like just launch standard IOS servers, attach them to the

gateway and the gateway does all the authentication all the hard parts of MCP for them and so there's a lot of ways to do this but that's good infrastructure you really want to have is just like make it trivial, make it like one command to just launch an MCP server that was a standard IOS server and suddenly the stream of HTTP server was authentication

integrated and you as a and developer only had to do the standard ayo part. Yeah, I love calling that stuff out because people will take that and actually put this into their companies. So, yeah, otherwise, also the alternative is chaos. Oh, yeah, reinventing everything. Shout out to Jeremiah. Actually, I did invite him to do a workshop on a Fast MCP

at my New York Summit. Yeah, he had a recently a very great plot post about, like, a lot of the usage of MCP who actually seeing is entangling companies. That's actually what we see at the moment, too. It's really cool. Like in what companies? Internally in companies.

In big enterprises, you see MCP everywhere. And it's actually way growing way faster than you would think because it's mostly internal to companies and we are people seeing it. About Discovery. So you launched a registry. There were registry companies. There were gateway companies. The official registry now has other registries putting their own MCP

hitting in your official registry. We need more registries, man. Just one more, bro. Just, yeah, what's the registry to rule them all? Any learning from that, like launching a registry for like a new technology and like whether or not, you know, people like, you know, Smithery is one example, right? If you go on the official registers, like all these Smithery AI MCPs that you need to authenticate through them.

So it's kind of like just a pass-through registry in a way. How do you see how is this going to shake out? I think we saw a lot of these like different registries come up and we've really felt that there is a need for basically like an MPM pie pie kind of. approach to this where like there's one more central entity that that is the where everybody can publish an MCP server too and that's really where the original registry came from and we really wanted to make sure that at least we're encouraging the ecosystem to have a common standard of what these registries can talk to

because what we want to do we want to live in a world where a model can auto select an MCP server from a registry install it and then all the given tasks that you have at hand and then you just use it right it should kind of feel magic but for that you need like some form of standardized interface. And so we're going to do, and that was really the inflection point of like, we started quite early working with the GitHub folks, even in April, and then I got distracted with other things like authentication and work on that. And so what I want to see, and I think where we're slowly slowly, slowly heading is a world

where we have the official registry where everybody can put the MCP server, but this is the equivalent to an MPM, which has the exact same problems of an MPM. Like, everybody can put it there. Basically, you don't know what to trust and what not to trust. You have supply chain attacks. These are just fundamental properties of public registries. I mean, that's why we have this concept of sub-registries,

which then like the smithereys and others hopefully can do, where they can filter and curate on top of it. And that's really the world we want to live in. I don't think we're quite there yet, but we're slowly getting there. Like, the GitHub registry is curated off the, or speaks the same format as the official registry. And so what we want is like you as a company can have an internal registry

that is a curated form of the official one plus maybe you own ones. I mean, that's the one you trust. And it speaks the same API than the official one. And if you have like a VS code or anything else that wants to talk to a registry, you just connect it to yours and you're good to go. And that's really what we want to do. It's interesting because NPM in a way, it's almost like a download gateway, you know?

It's like I'm not really using MPM for discovery that often. I don't go to NPM and search for packages. It's kind of like I find them in other ways. Is this you doing? Yeah. Yeah. I'm interested if you see like discovery is like a core piece of like the registry or like if you still assume that like there's going to be some other way that the agent discovers.

I do think discovery is important in the in the model world. But I think that's where it's different from MPM because we're building like something for AI first and we can assume there's an intelligent model that knows what it wants. I think that's something that didn't exist before, right? If you, maybe, I don't know if you would build modern package management systems with models at heart, maybe you would do a similar approach of just like, here's what I want to build, just figure out, I don't care what packages you can install, just do it, right? I mean, that's the equivalent in the end of the day.

But again, with the public register, you should probably not do this because it's a dumping and run for everybody. You want to do it against the curated, trusted registry. I like your phrasing that the model knows what it wants. Yeah. Because I think there's a lot of,

there's a dream that agents can use the MCP directories to discover any new servers, install it for itself. Yeah. That seems like very AGI if it works. Yes. But it may not work.

And I wonder what needs to happen in order to do that. I do think we need like a good registry interface on one hand. And then the second part is just like, We need to build for this and see, yeah, it works and what does. We need trust levels, maybe?

You definitely need trust levels. You need trust levels. You might need some form of like, yeah, you need trust levels, you might need some form of signatures, for example, like one of the ideas, I'm not sure if you're going to do it. It's just a random idea, but one of the ideas I always had is like, you can attach like signatures from like different model providers

that have scammed this MTP server and say, we trust this. Here's the signature from Anthropic that these tool descriptions are safe. and here's the signature from Open AI that these are trusted by us and then you can decide. Oh, wow. So I think these distributed code signing. It may be a kilometers.

It's not just really distributed. It's just like central in a way, right? But I think this is the kind of stuff you will require. Or, but I think in the simplest form, what you can do where you probably see it first is in scenarios like internally to a company where you have inherent trust because they will use a private,

They're effectively using private registries already for MPM. They're using for Pi Pi, and they will also do it for MCP servers. In there you have implicit trust, and then you can just search. Yeah, right? And I think that's really the interesting ground where we want to experiment. And that's like we have our internal registry an effective way because when you launch like via John's infrastructure, like an MCP server that gets registered, right? And so we need to go and experiment with that too.

Okay. I actually wanted to also ask, you started running some events over. in London. You had the agent's hackathon and you had Dev Summit that you called out in your timeline. I just wanted to get anecdotal stories of

stuff you learned as you saw the community spring to life. So we had two big summits this year. We read the MCP Deaf Summit in San Francisco. And the one in London too. And the one in London. And I think what you

learn is a few things. I think that the one thing is that it's very hard to get otherwise is just like these stories around how people use it internally in their companies. In there, you see some of the struggles, but you see also some of the success stories.

And one of the interesting bits that, which I really loved is like, particularly London, you had a lot of financial people there because it's like a financial hub and it was actually the whole conference was in the financial district. And learning just like the kind of problems

of like things you need to enforce because you have legal contracts because financial regulations, these were things that were that I did not know before, and I learned a lot about, like, okay, what does a thing like an MCP, like a communication layer need to look like if you have these, like, constraints that in a normal, like, development world doesn't exist.

Like, I give you an example, like, if you are in financial services, you're exposing some data, that data might be coming from a third party. And you must guarantee that you attribute that third party. And that's a legal contract. You must, like, if the client has placed this data to you, it must tell you this came from this third party, right?

And these are constraints that just, like, in the normal model world, don't really exist, right? But, like, in a financial industry, this is, like, legally enforced. And so these are the things you're like, okay, how will this work in a world where we're fourth MCP? And so now that's when we, like, started, like, creating this financial services interest group that Bloomberg is heading up to, like, figure out, like, what? some of the things that you like a client must do if it wants to speak to our financial services MCP server for example and you know what are the things that need to be respected and I think that's

the kind of things you only learn on the ground in the conference as talking to people right so I think there was some of these learnings there I think the other things that you just see is like just how many people are building and just the excitement and like the creativity that some people bring to this like that I just love right like and from areas you didn't expect right like I love the guys are Turkish Airlines. They just built the Turkish Airlines MCP server. You can search for flights

and stuff like that. So that was always fun. I love when like people bring some really creative parts to the MCP ecosystem. So I love these community when they come together because you're just meeting things that are a little bit outside of your bubble and you just get some input.

And I think there's a lot of learning there. And so we're going to repeat it again. We're going to do New York in April, I think, or March or something like that. And then we're going to do it again six months later. I absolutely love that. Any good sampling these cases? that you found?

Not so much. Okay. And that's always the, like, you know, the last time we talked about this. Do you fix sampling a little bit, man? Like, we, I think one thing I learned from sampling, like everyone wants to use tools with sampling in tools that are not exposed via the MCP server.

Like, when you want to do sampling, you want to have a set of new tools that you only want to use during that sample call. And we just had no ability to do it. And then we just fixed this in this iteration. And so we hope to see a little bit more, bit and more sampling use cases. You will find every now and then on MCP server that does it,

but particularly as MCP servers have moved away from more local to be more remote, in remote cases it's probably always better for you to bring an SDK because you have full control, you can deploy it, you can deploy an API case and maybe even charge someone. In a local case where something is really powerful, because you're shipping something to a lot of people and you don't know what is there, what is the model that they have configured, what is the application they plug it in,

it might be Viscope, might be Cloud Desktop, right? And in those cases, something is useful. But also, like, clients just don't support it. So sometimes is one of these things. I'm like, I'm still sad about it. I still think it's a very powerful idea. But, you know, you got to win some. You've got to lose some, you know.

No, no, no. But you're also, you know, upgrading it. And, you know, I'm, you know. My hopes are still up there. I'm like, weird. Like my, in some ways, you know, when you get it right, this will be the real agent-to-agent protocol. Yes, yes.

Are most of the use cases that you see still data consumption? That's been my use case for MCP, mostly. It's like getting data. Well, the most action my NCP takes is like update the linear task status. Have you seen very complex like MCP taking action workflows or are still people mostly using it for context? Most people use it for context. I think that's a vast majority of usage.

It is in the name. Model context. Yeah. Yeah. And Nick Cooper from OpenEI always keeps telling me rightfully so that the name MCP was probably a little bit poorly chosen because it feels it restricts it a little bit which I agree with.

It's mostly data use cases. I've seen people doing deep research via it. I think people, I suppose, agents wear it. And so they are a little bit more complex. But it's not super common. It's what people like to have experiment with it. Like they have like the deep research use case.

I think it's a good one. That is very, very, that's not too uncommon where people do like custom research. for it. But beyond that, most of it is really data. Beyond data and deep research aspects, now you have also this new aspect where people

expose like UI components or MCPI or what we're going to call MCPI in the future. And I think that's super promising and I think that's really quite fun. That's actually you see a lot now with chat chip T apps, with MCUI in general, that you see a lot. Yeah, and you have the tasks in the last

And we have tasks. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm curious because, like, if most use cases are, like, context and then you build tasks, it's almost like, people are not really using it for tasks. So I'm curious, like, how you design it, like, what you expect people to use. We design tasks because we come to us and go, like, okay, we really want long running operation, which is basically agents. We want, like, a long, deep, deep research task that finish this in an hour. We want tasks that, like, might not finish within the day, right? and people have like awkwardly tried to do this with your tools and you can

because tools are effectively just an RPC interface in the end of the day but it gets very quickly awkward because now the model needs to understand oh I need to pull this and it's just not very fun it's just not a first class primitive and you run into a lot of limitations

but it's come from the fact that people want to have a long running agents and that's like something we heard from so many areas and people trying to do this that we really felt we needed to do something I'm a test like on GitHub issues from big companies. Everybody was like, we need, we need something that long running operations is really top of mind. So I really think now we're going to see a lot of it.

But it's a little bit early to see how good's going to go because it just landed in the S&Ks and it needs to land in the clients and then we're going to see more of it. But I will, I think you will see a lot of the custom deep research parts with it and others. Yeah, I'm very bullish on tasks. I think it was very important to get right. Basically, every orchestration or protocol needs, has a sync version and an async version. Yeah, exactly. It's an async version.

Any like design choices that you want to call out that, you know, there were two directions and you picked one in just the overall design of tasks. Yeah, and design there was a lot of conversations. Like somewhere like, okay, is it just asynchronous tools? Do we do a different primitives? In the end of a day, it was important for me. My litmus test for it was always, it needs. needs to be able to, like, if I want to expose something like Cloud Code or like any other, like coding agent as an MCP server, hypothetically, this needs to work.

And a pure asynchronous tool call would just not do this. You want some form of operation that can return, for example, intermediate results in the long term. You want like, okay, I got to this result by calling this tool, this tool, this tool, I had this other input, I had this other tool, I did this, and now this is the result, right? that's really what you want to expose. And task is early, and it doesn't do that just yet, but it's built in a way that it will be generic enough to be able to support this.

So that was the main constraint. The other constraint was making sure it is, it's not a copy of tools where you can think about like, okay, we just do tools again, have slightly different semantics. But instead, what it's doing is like, is like you can create a task by calling a tool with a certain set of metadata fields

and then it automatically creates a task. So the task itself is just the concept of like a container that can't do something asynchronously. Yeah. Like just like, you do something asynchronously from starting here into any year. And the thing we're doing is a tool call. I mean, that opens the door to like later plug in other things

and maybe even other tasks. Like observability as well. Yeah, which is obviously going to be important. So I think that was really the design. goal, which makes it a little bit more abstract, a little bit more complicated to implement, but that goes away because the SDK is just do it for you. And the SDK, in the end of the day,

you're just going to be like, async call this and you return something. I mean, there you start to overlap with other async, like TRPC in JavaScript land or, you know, whatever goal put above stuff that goal people have. And the end of the day, it's designed like a classic RPC operating system, interface, like you create a task, you pull it until it's done, and then you can make an optimization, which we're going to do in the next round, which we didn't get a round, is like, okay, instead of

having to pull every minute or hour or whatever you interval, you choose, the server can call us events, call you, like, feel like a web poke or something and go like, I'm done, right? That's the optimization, but the actual core interface is always that the client can pull. And that's actually how, like, operating, all system operations and an operating system can work. It's like you pull, it has the file change, has the file changed. But you can also use like a modern interface on the kernel, like I Notify or something like that, or Uring or something that to tell you, oh, I'm done. Great. Yeah.

The file has changed. There's a trick I learned where like servers can hold the HTTP connection until it's done and then they terminate and that's the signal to the callback. Yeah, which we do not necessarily want to do because it might take a few days and I don't know how people. It's very irresponsible, but it's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are plenty of ways. I think we were just going to go the webbook way, honestly. Tasks are really interesting,

and we basically have to invent this when we did this at, did like the Devon API, a cognition, and I think that's also like an interesting reinvention of like, well, everyone is going to need some kind of long-running operation. And this is, well, when you're calling an agent, you also need this. Yeah.

But the interesting part for us is what MCP is always trying to, MCP always tries to encapsulate what currently people trying to do and we not want to be prescriptive what you're supposed to do in a year from now. We don't know, we don't predict. We did tasks because people like, we need this now, right? We need this basically six months ago and we're like, okay, I guess now it's time to do this, right? Instead of trying to do, being predictive of the future, which is why we're trying to keep the protocol somewhat minimal and have, I think to some degree achieved this, although other people

would think already there's too many primitives in the protocol. one minor thing and so let's say super long running paths a lot of messages go back and forth Anthopic

actually was a kind of leader in context compression or in compaction maybe let's just call it and I think

a lot of the other labs are also doing the same thing is there a way to handle that or do we

just statelessly sort of cut context and it's fine do you need a full log

of everything that happens or no you just ask the fellow yeah right no no you don't

like I think we I think they're does the thing, right? We're very early in industry still. We're learning a lot about like what does the model date, what does not need, right? And even today, like, some agents start to, like, drop tool call results after a few rounds because they don't need it anymore. I think that's very, very good. And so I think besides compaction, you will see I just better mechanics of, like,

understanding what you need and what you don't need. Like, for a long asynchronous test, you might have a way where, like, okay, maybe for a while the model sees it, but once you, you get the result, you just drop everything else. Or you might, might even call like a small model, like a haiku modeling, go like, what all this I should retain? You tell me, right? You might be like the AIIP approach,

would be just like, let the model figure out what it needs to retain, right? And so you can see both worlds and I think there's just lots to learn. I think there's not the one answer yet because I think we're still figuring these type of things out and we're just improving. And compaction is a good step for it, but I don't think it's the last step there either. actually the most obvious one, but I don't think it's like, I think if you pay more attention to it, if you particularly think about like, okay, what could you train a model to do here?

I think we get to much better ways of doing that, but they're all like independent from how you obtain the context. And I think MCP I always see is like back to like it's an application protocol. That's just how you obtain the context, how you select the context, that's the problem for the application. And that's the problem all the agent applications will have in the end of a day. And there will be a lot of different techniques. a year ago, everybody would have told you it's rag style stuff, but it's now apparently dead, right? And now we do, we use models, we use compactions. So I don't know what's going to happen any year from now.

Cool. Around MCPs, another question I had is like, how do you see them as being used by developers to build AI apps versus being a protocol for AI consumers to plug things in? I think that's one of the main things people get wrong, where it's like, well, I can just use a REST API. Why do I need MCP? And to me, it's almost like, it's not really for that developers. use is for like people using AI tools to just plug things in.

I get the comparison with the rest API is quite a lot. And I think there's interesting, it's funny enough because there's two problems in general. Like the first one is rest does not tell you what to do an authentication. The second part is that already complains to me about like tool bloat. Have you looked at like the average open API spec lengths? If you put that into a model, like you will have a lot of bloat there too, right? Actually way worse. And funny enough, when people try to like map one-to-one things,

often the model gets slightly confused because you have like search by name, search by ID, search by something, right? And suddenly you have like five tools that look very similar to each other and the model goes like, which one do you want? I have no clue anymore. So anyway, that side note to rest versus MCP.

But I do think MCP, I want to live in a world where it's like very much like a consumer-focused thing but something consumers shouldn't know about. But then what I want is I want a world where you go to your, application, you say, do this and it should just do the thing and it should just connect to the right services.

That MCP is under the hood is a detail that the developer needed to know about because that's the communication channel that they're talking. But in the end of the day, you just get the tasks done, right? And I actually prefer a world where nobody of, like, my mom should not know what MCP is, right? If she wants to use cloud at the end of a day. But I do think it's very focused on that plugability. of like an external like service

and in that regard more like on the consumer focus side and there are still use cases for developers in general like first of all as builders but also like I still love my playwright MCP's never man yeah but I don't know from developer tool the new Chrome one is like the new

right the new meta yeah I also understand like for developers right like that run like cloud code locally you know like things like he lies can be better approach right to some degree and that's okay I'm curious about the MCP apps UI with what you're talking about, where it's like every client, like, Chad JupT has their own, right? So it's like if I'm used to the MCP app of this product, but then if I go in chat

GPT, there's like a different version that they curated. It's kind of like a different experience. So I'm curious how you feel about that. Like, do you feel, especially now that you have open eye and the foundation, right, do you feel like all of this will be MCP backed in the same structure? There's two influences, right? Like MCPI UI existed as a project, which had a lot of really good ideas. I took some of them and really improved upon them. And now, one thing we just announced three weeks ago on the MCP

block is that we're actually working with all two of them together to build like a common standard. And so we're really hoping that we're getting back to the world where you build for one platform and you can use it across all of them. You build for right ones run everywhere. For chat jop-tee and you might be able to use it in Cloud

or in the goose or whatever it might be that the program of your choice that implements this. But I think the general problem is what we have is to think that there are certain problems, like if you think about a modern AI application, everything is very text-based. And that's okay, it's nice,

but there's things that as a human, you're just way better suited to do in visual, right? The most basic example is, like, you want to, like, book a flight, seat selection, right? Like, you now get select, like, do you want to do seat selection in text? It's like, here's, like, the 25 seats you have available.

Like, nobody's, fucking wants to do that, right? Like, I have no clue where these seats are even... As shoe-based drawing. Yeah. Of course, we want an application that you can select with, or it might be like a theater that you want to book for, or something like that. It's so obvious that you do want to have some

form of, like, an application in the user interface that the model can navigate and that the model can interact with, but you as a human can also interact at the same time. And I think that's what we're looking for. And so I think it's just this next situation of, like, building richer interfaces because the pure text interface is just

somewhat limited and there's very natural things and you're like you see there's a music production you will see it of course or you will have like certain brands that will deeply care about presenting their interface shopping is a good example man like shopping has like 20 years of like a-b testing what's the best way to sell you something right and so and shopping interfaces are super complicated actually and you just want a way for displaying that to the users that's familiar to them and that they they can interact with that and that's what MCP apps is in the end of the day. Yeah. And technical direction-wise, is the

eye frame the way there was... Yeah, it's an I frame. It's, it's, um, you are serving basically raw HTML over, um, over an MCP resource. It goes into an eye frame and then it talks to the outside where post messages over a specific interface. And so what you can do

now, you can, because it's raw HTML and you're not really like loading some external content, you're going to get, uh, you can analyze it in advance if you wanted to with security. And because you have an iFram, you can, like, the external application, like, can just speak, like, a very clear bounded or, like, security bounded. Yeah, and this has been in browsers forever.

I think that the, I'm scared of it only because I hate course issues. Yeah. And I frame always have course issues. Yeah. But this, again, this does not load anything external. Like, it is surely, like, it should not, right? Like, there probably are restrictions that we, like, then iterate and iterate, and then in five years, maybe it has, 25 course headers and whatnot, whatever.

never, right? But I think we're starting small again. It was like pure raw HTML, you should probably not have external references. We don't run into these issues, but you're right. And can I inherit styles? No, in this eye frame. I think you need to put it in mind. Yeah, obviously like you will want it, I feel like this is really minor, but

UI people care about this. Yeah. Which is you have, it should look like chatGBT. Yeah. Yeah. In the chat GBT should like cloud and say cloud. I think that's a very good question. I'm 100% agree with you, like brands and all this who are deeply, deeply care about it. Designers will. Oh, 100%. And that's something we need to figure out.

And that's where you need to get it out of the door and see how people use it and then iterate on it. That's why I don't think it should be an eye frame long term. I don't know what the solution is. But we need like new Iframe that lets some permeability because of this stuff. I think that's sensible, yes. Well, I don't know. But the other solution to the problem is the IGI-pild approach of why just give it a tool that says, give me a style sheet. And the model can call you and tell you what you're supposed to look like.

Okay. Should an MCP app be, know what it's being used, what the parent application is, is? You know what I mean? It might be, like, the application also exposes tools, right? The model is free to call it. Right, right, right. Okay, so maybe standard as an interface for people to pass down styles. Maybe, yeah.

Maybe, I don't know. But it's a very big question. Let me ask the team. I'm just like, I'm mostly right directly there. I'm like not in the weeds of doing everything there. Yeah, it seems like a little bit of a surprise to me. I never really paid any attention to MCP UI, and then suddenly you guys all adopted it.

I was like, okay, well, I guess this is a part of FCP now. Yeah. And it went from a purely back-end concern to now front-end. It's also like notable is technically an extension to MCP. Like it's not MCP-MCP. That's a pure technicality because... It's a governance thing, right? Yeah, it's mostly like if you are a client that can render HTML,

then you might want to consider implementing it, but you're still an MCP client if you don't. And the reality is, you average, like, you average, like, CLI agent can't do it, right? So they will never do it. And so I think that's fine. Are there any other extensions, though, similar?

We're going to look into, like, financial services as an extension where, like, okay, you might end up in a world in a year from now. There might be clients that have, like, certifications that they're in, and get, like, a signature that they're, like, financial services, MCP clients. and they can prove it for the server and only then the server allows

connections because it knows they are respecting attributions, these daily contracts that you put into place. And you will see this everywhere. You will, if you want to deal in the long run with public servers and public clients that do like deal with

HIPAA data, like healthcare data, you will have to have guarantees. Isn't it part of just off or off? Not necessarily. Like I give you an example. Like, if I have, the client might need to have have five servers installed and if there's one healthcare server

that healthcare server might tell you you are not allowed in this session to use any of the other MCP servers because this data I'm giving you cannot leave you right you must guarantee that this data doesn't go anywhere else because it's hyper data because it's financial data

whatever it might be this is a good example and that might be some of the enforcement you need to do because you just like you don't want to have your or your social security number healthcare data show up in a near accident, right? Awesome. We're going to transition and have the rest of the AIAF group join, but any final call to action, like either, you know, people that should join your team, people that should

contribute to the MCP spec or anything else. I think the most important part is still building with MCP on a day-to-day basis for people to just go out, build really good MCP servers. I think we see a lot of mediocre MCP servers and I mean, some very, very good ones. and just building good MCP servers looking at how to use them. I think that's super important. The second aspect to that is like, we're a fairly open community and we're running it as a traditional open source project that is based purely on what people are able to put in in terms of effort and time.

And so just like being an active part, like either giving us feedback, being in the Discord channel, talking with us, giving us ideas, while also just helping us implementing like the touch of SDKs, the Python SDKs. You're always looking for a new SDKs, right? Like we have active Go SDK development, but we don't have a Haskell SDK. I don't know if you're a Haskell developer,

maybe you want to write a right, right? Yeah, there you go. And so I think there's a bunch of stuff we can do and be part of it. And I think I don't understand how much you can just be part of the community, but also just like go and build. And I think there's so much opportunity now, particularly to build like amazing clients

now that we have understood progressive discovery better, now that we have understood code mode better. There's just this next iteration of clients to build, the next iteration of servers to build that I'm just looking forward for people to do. Yeah. My last question or call out

is I wanted people to hear directly from you. I sense the energy. I'm very excited by everything that you're doing. But a lot of people are anxious about NCP joining the Linux Foundation. They're like, oh, is this Anthropic taking his eye off the ball? Can you address those concerns? Yeah, I love that you ask me that.

Like, I think, yeah, I can totally see why people think that but it's actually quite the opposite. Like, the commitment of Anthropics is the same, I'm still, we still have the same people I'm helping with the SDKs. We're still super committed in our products to MCP. I'm still the lead core maintainer. Nothing has actually changed. What really is the main part of the foundation is like two things.

The number one is like making sure that the whole industry knows that this will stay forever open, that this cannot be taken away. And there have been, they have been like, I'm probably would never do this, I think. But there have been histories of like companies going like taking an open source project and suddenly making it proprietary again. we have protocols that are proprietary. Look at HTML. Look at like what's the problems of HTML and Linux.

What's on the HTML? HTML 2.1. HTML forum does not want to allow the AMD to develop open source Linux drivers for HTML2.1. Really? There's some, look it up. Wow. So, you know, there's people like keep a very close tap on it. And what this does is like, no, this is now owned by a mutual entity.

it will always stay open. You can use the word MCP. Nobody's going to sue you over it. So there's a bunch of that just giving the ecosystem and the industry that confidence that this stays neutral. I think that's important. The second part to that is that I think one thing I'm, if anything, I'm the most proud of

is that I think we have set the tone for open standards in the industry and being able to now use that momentum to build like community in a space where people can come and bring really well done, well supported, well maintained projects

and have them part of this foundation. I think that's the other part to that. But the funny part of like our bar for the foundation is going to be like, it needs to be like really well maintained. It's not like you're taking, you're taking the ball off. It's actually exactly that what we don't want.

And so we will not do that for us. MCP is still core to the product and still super important, anthropic, and so we're still just as much as committed as we've ever been. Amazing. Awesome. Thanks for joining, David. And we're here in the studio with core team members of AAAF.

It's the biggest panel we've ever had on the podcast. So welcome, guys. Maybe we'll go left to right and introduce everyone. And also identify the voices for people listening on audio. I'll start. I'm Jim Zemlin, the CEO of the Linux Foundation. I've been working there 22 years. And I was the person who helped solicit.

the launch of the foundation, but take no credit for any of the technology work that's to my left. I'm Nick Cooper from OpenAI. I've been there just over two years now, I think. I'm generally Open AI's like head of a lot of protocol things and very interested in the open ecosystem and our representative for AAIF as well as a core contributor to NCP.

Got it. What's another protocol that might fall on in that umbrella? Agents and D, just in general, like not just the protocols but also the product experiences of where open AI products intersect of the SaaS provider things and other systems. I'm David Soria Parra.

I am working at Anthropic, a member of technical staff there. I'm the co-creator of MCP and yeah, Anthropic and mostly lead all the MCP efforts. Great. And I'm Brad. I'm the principal engineer at Block. So by day I build AI products

and by night I work on open source like Goose and at the Arracial author of course. It's great to see everybody come together. I think when I heard about the news, I didn't really expect it. It wasn't on my bingo car. So maybe let's have a little bit of inside baseball. So you obviously have open an anthropic

and yesterday at the launch event you were joking on how you didn't know that the two companies even talk to each other. And then, yeah, how did the conversation start? The conversation started out of two things. The first one is that on the MCP side, we always knew that we wanted

to find a neutral home for MCP to make sure that the industry understands that this stays open, that this is something safe to adopt. And then very early in the process, as we were looking around like what to do about this, should this be a project in a foundation, should this be inside its own foundation, which is like these common patterns you see for this kind of work. And we got approached by our friends at Block to discuss because they were looking into like donating goose, I think, at the time.

And so there was a question around doing something together. And then we approached OpenEI and they were very, very welcoming and very open to the idea as well. And it slowly looked formed. And I think, you know, at the time from of this is like a few months, these things are not happening out of thin air in like a week or so. And so just a lot of conversation, like, what do we want to do? What are the kind of like constraints we want to have? And what is the thing we want to build? And of course, we were looking for.

where to put this kind of stuff, and that's where the Linux Foundation comes in, as I think the biggest foundation of its kind, and certainly has decades of experience helping companies through a process like this. I'm building what is technically called a directed fund within the Linux Foundation to build these kind of things out. I think David said basically all the story from my side as well, which is, so we saw this need to connect systems and their names. gain such very large developer attraction.

And we had opening, I were very excited to, like, use and then contribute and actively participate in this. And from my point of view, it was always very natural that this would grow into something bigger and move to a neutral place. And, like, MCP has always been, like, a foundation for, like, communication between agents and context.

And in a similar way, the agentic foundation is, well, it's a foundation. But also, it's, like, the starting point where I really look forward to other contributions. like we're starting with Goose, our own agents MD, where we're really open for like a lot of technical contributions to build out like a full agentric ecosystem. I'm curious, Jim, you know, I've been to Linux Foundation events before I've spoken

to them. It's almost like, it's an MCP so early that like, how do you even structure it in a way? I'm curious because so many of the technologies that the foundation supports like kind of core pillars of infrastructure and the internet. This is probably like the youngest technology that you brought in as a foundation. what are the goals of it? Yeah, I mean, I think what's interesting here is even though it's young, I think if you, I think AI years are kind of like dog years.

Absolutely. Do you use this metaphor, right? Yeah, totally. This is why I ran three conferences a year. Yeah, exactly. You can't do annual. I think last night someone was asking, what do you see a year from now? And I'm like, well, if I dial the clock back a year, would I have anticipated.

where we're at right now, there's no way. And so I think part of the thing with MCP is that we're just living in this kind of dog year's velocity in the past. I think things took a lot more time to coalesce. And what is clear is that a lot of people are adopting MCP, see it in commercial products that companies are rolling out, you see a lot of usage in the enterprise already. And there still is a ways to go in terms of the technology becoming mature. I think the same thing held in internet protocols, you know, that took a little bit longer to mature, and the internet matured over time.

But I think the thing I'm most excited about, it's becoming clear that MCP will be a key protocol for this technology movement. And I think, you know, David and these folks were all pretty wise to realize that, you know, if internet protocols had been owned by a single entity, he'd still be. calling it American online. It wouldn't work. And I think that this has got all of the underpinnings to be a huge movement. At the Linux Foundation, we ask three questions for every project. Will this be meaningful and impactful for industry and society? The second question is, do you need more than one organization to collaborate to do it?

Otherwise, you don't need us. It's a case clearly we've got that. Then three, can we get the resources? and build an ecosystem around it and 50 companies on day one, you know, a huge set of folks in line to participate in my email inbox, I'm sure your guys are too, is like full in 24 hours. How do I participate?

We want to contribute. How do I get in there? I've never seen that kind of inbound interest starting any project at the Linux Foundation in 22 years. How do you pick? you've got all these people reaching out there's good a med it's a really good question

I think it's like how to pick how we expand the foundation itself from a governance standpoint but also like technical contributions and how can the foundation best support them as well that's like really tough in my mind it's like the first thing we need to like define some structure and work out what we

like how to bring it all together but I think even before like those details there's such value in establishing this one forum that people can come to, like, even having a list of eager technical participants and potential opportunities, that's a huge opportunity in front of us to, like, distill what's truly meaningful to develop as users and everyone. And very appreciated the Lins Foundation reacting is like sort of a galvanizing rod for this, like, attention. Brad, on the sort of block and goose side, it's an interesting, the involvement that you guys

have had in the sort of engagement that you guys have had, what was your calculus? joining the AIF? So for us, I think it's like in developing something like Goose, I think the thing that I see it as being part of this umbrella is it's the most concrete piece. So you can actually like download Goose and use it in a way that you can download an AGSMD. Like what are those parts do together without having something that actually like connected to clients?

Like a real client. And there's I think a lot of value in that because when you get. into the protocol space, you want to add things to it, but you have to actually show, like, what is enabling. Like, why are you making the protocol wider and putting it into, like, a reference implementation shows you, like, oh, it's giving this value to people, like, very concretely. And I think there's some, like, for example, there's, like, a spec for MCP, MCP apps that is brand new, and we've been working on MCPUI. For Goose?

Yeah. So Goose has been, like, kind of a day one partner with the MCPUI team. Oh, I don't know. And so now we've got NCP apps. We'll go, we have opened an issue today about how we're going to go get that into Goose. And so that's something where people, I think you hear something abstract like that. Like what is send, what is the server sending an eye frame to the client like do? And I think Goose is a place where you can see it.

Like, okay, you're going to build a dashboard or you're going to have this enhanced chat experience. And so this is something where I think we collaborate more and more to say like, this is what it looks like at how you look at some of these abstract things and make them real. I think the other tidbit here, maybe like back to the history of both MCP and Goose is like, Goose was the first open source agent interface or agent that reached out to us and worked with us to integrate MCP. And I think Brad is actually like technically the first non-anthropic contributor to MCP ever on like day two or something like that, like very, very early.

So this goes all the way back to like November last year to like the partnership of having MCP inside Goose. Yeah, we had a version of Goose that was still, you can go check the GitHub history. It was there a little bit before MCP came out. And we were sitting there with like a plug-in ecosystem who were like, this is awful. Like, why would anyone come develop a plugin just for Goose? But we saw all these opportunities. And so we started talking to Anthropic. And we were like, I think that there's a space here for a protocol.

And they're like, well, let me tell you about. And it was really cool to see you know what this is. I, no, no, no, we didn't. We reached out before we heard the Zet thing. And so we were like, okay, like, yes, we just want to, like, we want to pile onto something that has a chance of succeeding because as like a client, it's like an ecosystem, right? Like, the more people are here using it, you get more value as a client that as a server because, you know, your servers are going to work with any client and that as a client, you know, you have this live giant library of servers. And so that's been like a big part of what Gooks does is that it's not really like, it is a coding tool. people use it as a coding tool but you can turn off the code part and you can just connect to any MCP server and so it can be like operating like a science experiment I've seen that

or like just like Google Docs or whatever and I think that it kind of shows you how MCP goes beyond just like the back coding space yeah I think as well it's also the fact that it's concrete is so important like for all these standards like there's a long history of standards throughout computing that like

people like proactively write a standard and then when it's actually tried out, it has problems. But like for MCP and like all these new agentic standards we're coming with, we really want demonstrated utility. Like the most common thing on the call committee is like there's a proposal and we come back to people saying like, have you tried it out? Does it work? But the protocol is about communication.

So if you're trying something out, you need collaborators and you need like concrete open source projects like Goose and you need clients, a variety of servers, because it's only with that sort of open ecosystem, they can meaningfully understand if this is actually going to work. I totally agree with that. I mean, I think the world of standards in open source development are just merging, right? You sort of co-develop these things together. I think I was trying to figure out whether David is VintSurf or Linus Torvalds for agents.

And I think maybe it's a little more, it means a little more VintSurf, from them maybe Ghost is a little more Apache web server and my whole Linus part kind of falls apart at that point. But you do need something substantive to try the protocols out in order to make sure how to improve them. It's that feedback loop that's so critical. OpenEI also has a coding agent that is open source.

I think what's the thinking there apart from like, well, would Codex ever be donated to AIF? or we just don't know yet? I think the short answer is we don't know yet, but it's sort of like a feedback loop, which is in this open ecosystem, like we don't want to have too much alignment all on like one implementation, one thing.

There's like real value to users and developers or whoever's the participant to like active competition in some parts. So there's this balance of like, we need openness to foster like collaboration and experimentation but like I would like to see a variety of coding agents and each one might deliver unique value, different value and be free to explore independently.

So it is sort of like a careful balance here. It's a bit of like a taste-making approach to like contribute things that benefit from being open. Like agents and D is an example, which is open up any GitHub repository. It has this file that works the same way. Like if everyone sort of did their own thing there, that's very low value.

potentially damaging it. But so there's commonality value, whereas for actual concrete implementations and projects, it's great to have reference implementations in many ways or experimental grounds like goose, but I really favor a huge variety of them, because that way we'll see what comes to the be the best. Is there a roadmap for what you want to add?

For example, the agenda commerce protocol, like chatubedia already uses, but that's not a part of it. There's no model as a part of the foundation. Do you already have a roadmap or like you said, you're just kind of like going month by month and what are people using and what should be in there? I think we don't have a roadmap in the sense of like projects lined up,

but I think what we have is principles but which we will select projects to some degree. And I think the effort here is mostly around sitting together after the now the foundation is created and then evolving these principles as we're seeing people going to ask us about the projects they would want to put in. And then they've developed the foundation further as time goes.

But at the moment, I think the most important part is that we have the principles in place, and then you go and having the conversations with people who want to be part of this foundation. One principle that really comes to mind to me is composability. I often use the analogy of like Lego blocks sort of thing, which is agentic systems are a sum of many, many parks. And so, like, something that I hope the foundation can evolve to do is have these, like, interoperable, composable bits that all work together, pinkly. And so we don't have a roadmap of, like, future contributions.

But, like, I welcome all contributions that play nice with other contributions and, like, really create this potentially, like, a future, flexible, open agentic stack to be, like, not a universal agent, but an agent that suits everyone's purpose or need. Yeah, it's tricky. It's a hard, and these guys have the harder job of early in innovation cycle. You don't want to restrict innovation by saying like, oh, well, this is the one, you know, versus that one. But you also don't want to let every single random thing, you know, into an organization like this. And so I do think you need this tastemaking is a good way to describe it where a group of, you know, elite architects.

and developers, you know, folks like the three people said next to me, are more curating. And, you know, some things can work. Some things might not, but there needs to be a process, which I think will define to do that, that curation that happens via tastemakers. And it's more of a, not just more, but essentially a technical effort, not something where a committee of, you know, folks from vendors get together and say, well, my product should be in this roadmap and that guy's product should be in this roadmap. It tends to not be very successful. We should lead to this other principle that we really want projects that are have a lot of attraction that are well maintained, that are very, very healthy in the plantation.

I think that's super important to us. Right. I think like you're looking for something to have already found a niche and to be established because you don't really want to be pushing like a speculative architecture, you really want to be embracing something that already works. And so I think a lot of the stuff that we're talking about, like payments or like kind of I really enjoy the like interface to model architectures. I think those are really interesting, but it's not yet obvious that that pattern needs to exist. And so that's something that we can go see it and like try to make it work in some projects and then come bring that back if it really has a role.

And on the opposite, what's my incentive to bring my project? I have a project with adoption. It's well maintained. It's healthy. What's the benefit that I get from donating to the foundation? I mean, I can start that, but I'd love to hear from these guys as well. I think what you, all technology is an implicit futures contract, right? And so, you know, if there's technology that has traction and that traction sort of wants to be built upon, having that technology, a neutral place like the Agentic AI Foundation, where the whole industry is making decisions about how to invest. And when I mean, when I say investment, I don't mean like becoming a member of the foundation because you don't need to become a member to participate on the technical side. It's decisions about, hey, I'm going to, you know, assign 10 of my company's engineers to co-develop this with your organization, the contributing organization. And, you know, that's a way that we

can all essentially co-developed together, and that will provide better support, more development velocity, higher code quality, because more people are participating in it. And that's a massive incentive if you want your technology to actually be used and adopted in industry and get more feedback and kind of a positive feedback loop of great project that gets great products in the market. That market feedback then allows companies to make money off of them. They then pay engineers to improve the project, better products, more profits, better project, and, you know, that's the incentive, which is a pretty high one. Could add a technical sort of spin, which is none of these things that built out of a vacuum,

like all these projects build on lessons and learnings or practical code from other projects, and that's a big opportunity. Like any technical contribution will bring its own unique value to the foundation, at the same time, it then gets to learn the lessons that all the other participants in the foundation do. And like, I found it really valuable over this past year working with David and others on the MCP committee about like, it's actually that communication thing that makes our ideas more robust, makes the implementation better, we can be sure it's secure and safe and actually works. This requires communication.

And that sort of, the foundation is the natural like town square, but this in a way. So one last angle on this, I think if you're working on a standard or a protocol, this is such an obvious decision, right? Like the value in the protocol is about how many people are adopting it. So being a part of this, like, gets you that reach. But I will say as someone who's working on a client and not a protocol, I think there's value there too, right? Like we want this to be part of the foundation because we like develop these ideas together to your point. And so it makes it better. Like we're donating Goose because we think it's going to make it a higher quality tool.

I actually have a follow-up question on just the LF side. LF has many other funds and organizations, including data and AI foundation, as well as dedicated like PITORCH and all the other ones. I guess why a new foundation? Well, because everyone's special. No, I think that the way we look at in this space, I'll put aside the projects in semiconductor tech

in operating system and stuff, but in AI, we think of it sort of like how the market has evolved. It started with tools like PiTorch and the transformer tech that is used to create LLMs. The Linux Foundation kind of took a pass

on a frontier model world because in the open source space, having connection to the internet and some intelligence and a computer, that's sort of entry. In the world of frontier LLMs, It's a computer connection to the internet, some intelligence, $2 billion with the GPUs and a ton of data. Harder for consortiums to do that kind of work.

So pass. Then you look at how, you know, reasoning models have come out, need to be, you know, in inference world, things need to be scalable. Okay, now you've got interesting technology, VLM, Ray, things like that. They have to be deployed on something. Kubernetes is sort of that. these are all distinct components. Agents are a distinct enough set of technology that it merits its own community.

Separate from DETAN. Yeah, because like a pie torch dev isn't really doing a ton of stuff in agent land, right? You know, somebody working on dockling maybe is a little more adjacent, right? But not quite the same as somebody who's, like, working on Transformer Tech or VLLLM. And so they are logical categories.

I mean, sometimes stuff comes in over time and, you know, we sort things out later. We had early on in the telecommunications sector, you know, a software-defined networking effort, a network function virtualization, orchestration effort, a whole bunch of stuff, all separate entities. And they, I was like, let's just bring all these things together because the technology is now mature. We're taking all this money in, but we don't really need the resources any. more because the market's already mature. And so it took me a year to get all these companies to decide to bring all these things together and not pay all these separate fees and have all these separate orgs.

I have a little folder in my inbox that says, you know, convincing people not to give me money. But in this world, I think it's a different kind of audience. I think it's narrow enough. I think it's specific enough to agents where it merits its own entity. I think as well it dovetails somewhat with the earlier thought, like with a pacemaking aspect to this. For these organizations to be effective, they really need a focus,

like something that brings them together. Loers. And ultimately, like, you can imagine an alternative where we snowball and there's only the Linux Foundation. Is this Uber do everything remotely connected to a computer?

And that wouldn't be that effective. So there's a tastemaking here as well, which is going to be focused on the genetic systems and how they connect together, hence the GenderK.I. Foundation. But, like, everything's about growth and evolutions. there's a possibility that later down the line, we recognize some natural affinity.

There's something new, something old, and then they can be brought together. But the focus helps the beginning, certainly. What's going to be the actionable outcomes? So obviously you have the funds to direct. I know a lot of the Linux Foundation does events. There's also like eventually like certification, things like that. What's the split of the foundation investments? Is a lot of it going back to different projects individually?

is it about the community building? And then from people that have not been involved from the outside, it's like, there just seems like a nice blog post and a bunch of logos, but like in reality, how are things kind of reactioned? Yeah, I mean, 50 companies coming into fund

a bunch of blog posts seems like overkill. Right. Exactly. So I think there's a couple of things. One, the intellectual property assets now are owned by this entity. That entity is responsible for making sure that, you know,

that IP is managed effectively that licenses are complied with, that intellectual property problems are dealt with. Some funding goes to that. There's a leadership function where, you know, to help bring consensus across the industry and within developer communities, you have to have a special kind of someone to do that. And I think they need to be technically knowledgeable, but humble enough to know that the community is the one who makes the technical decisions. So kind of just, you know, sort of lead through influence to kind of help people organize things effectively.

So you hire some people to do that. You hire people to do like developer outreach community engagement because you want more developers coming into the community. So funding to go to that. And then there's a huge convening function. The Linux Foundation hosts 50,000 plus virtual meetings a year. So we have this like, I think we're probably like one of the largest. users of Zoom. I know for sure we're the largest Slack user in the world. And so that convening function is critically important. Make it as seamless and easy as possible to convene. And then, yeah,

we hold events because I think, you know, to your point, developer engagement face to face, being the town square where you physically get together means something. So I think you guys have been to KubeCon. You know, we have easily 10,000 people. that come to that conference twice a year. In Europe this summer, there were 13,000 folks there who, you know, come in, and they exchange ideas, the core maintainers get together and make real decisions. And then the last thing we spend resources on, and you can go even just check these out for some of our other projects, is we have a whole platform that enables, you know,

maintainers to look at their community and understand, you know, like, what's our velocity, how many developers are we adding? Like, what's the social media scuttle butt around this project? What are leading indicators of adoption? How's our security doing? Like, you know, do we have good practices about application security? And those are all things that we, you know, invest in to help make these communities, you know, better commercially adopted. So that we get that positive feedback loop of like adoption begets more investment in the form of developers providing input.

and that virtuous cycle kicks off. That's where the funding goes for these kind of things. I put in that question into our doc because it says it's a directed fund. So my cheeky question was, well, what are you directing him to? So it's kind of, so directed fun gets into like the nerdiness of this. Yeah, so, but it's, the reason we structure it that way is somebody has to own everything. The Linux Foundation is actually ownership vehicle. And remember, we separate technical governance from,

the governance of actually how money gets spent because we don't want this sort of pay-to-play aspect of technology that tends to screw everything up. And so the directed fund is really like, you know, real stakeholders who really care about this tech, put money in and use it in a way to help build the market and the community and all the things I just talked about and just let developers do what they're super good at, get together, solve tough problems, be, you know, tastemakers, that that's something that we separate. Yeah, I think there's a great essay by Rich Hagey created a closure about open source. It's not about you.

Just because something in open source, I don't know to respond to your issue and to progress. And I think some of the worries sometimes that people have about the groups is like, well, you know, if not you're a part of this thing, I'm supposed to also listen to your thing and implement the thing that you said. So I think there's going to be a super interesting thing in a technology that is so new. you know, I feel like everybody, because there's so much venture money in like early stage companies and like, obviously the foundation model labs raised so much money that they need to be on top of it. There's a lot more pressure, I think, from the community to try and be a part of it and like put their stake and be like, yeah, we've contributed that or whatnot.

So I just think it's like a unique compared to like the CNCF, for example, where the hyperscalers are kind of like around the clouds and we all know what those workloads look like and like nobody's really trying to influence. There's not like a open-AI preferred thing versus like an anthropic preferred thing. But it wasn't always so. So when we started CNCF, I got a call from, I think it was Erz Holstel and Brian Stevens, who were over at Google. It was 2014, I want to say.

And, you know, they're competing. Well, they weren't even competing. They weren't in the cloud business. And they wanted to be in that business. Amazon was, you know, hosting virtual machines on EC2, and they were the de facto leader. They said, we will give away Kubernetes, which was kind of the

Borg and they renamed the Kubernetes to the Linux Foundation. And because we've never run a virtual machine, we think containers are a better way to scale cloud applications. We'll give you this tech and it'll be helpful to us if the entire industry

adopts containers and Kubernetes as the way to build and deploy applications. That was the strategy out of Google and they contributed some serious IP that we all know today is awesome. But at the time, remember, Mesos was still a thing. Like, Paz was still a thing, right?

Like, you know, Hiroku, Cloud Foundry, even OpenStack, like virtual machines were still kind of a thing. So it wasn't clear what the abstraction layer for cloud computing was. But once the market started sort of piling on to Kubernetes, you know, like, oh, now Microsoft joined Cloud Native Computing Foundation. They're investing in Kubernetes and creating Kubernetes services. Oh, wait, Amazon's now investing in this? Then the consensus was really coming and built up here.

I think there's a somewhat similar situation here with the caveat of saying like 10 times faster. Right. Like just day one, so much momentum around MCP, so much interest in this. And then also 10 years of CNCF to sort of teach the developer community and the vendor community how to do this well where, you know, investment is not mutually exclusive to great technical outcomes, I think has been super positive. So I think this thing's going to move super fast. Awesome.

We don't want to keep you guys too long. I'm sure you've been on a media tour this week. What's maybe from each of you, like one thing you look forward in the new year from the foundation? So I don't really know what it's going to be looked like. I really look forward to like the next step. Like as David mentioned, like it's being moms of development and discussion or whatever to bring us to this. And there's this sense of, I guess, relief achievement. It was like, you know, you made a foundation.

We're collaborating. We created this open space. It's great. But the what next? I'm super excited for the next technical contribution for the first AAIF event or night or conference or whatever form that ends up taking. Because there's another world where like bodies and foundations are created and then like eventually they get forgotten. And this is not that.

this is really a beginning. And so I want to see it be healthy and grow. And I just don't know what comes next. So I'm most excited to see that in the new year. I think you're most excited. If I really take a neutral look of what just happened in the industry with creating this, it's like you have Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudfare, Open Air, Anthropic,

just a platinum member, create a foundation. I think it's just like, this is actually quite cool. quite substantial. And now it's just like, now we have this like starting point of like, what can we do with this? And to Nick's point, we don't, I think there's a lot of like things we don't know yet

and like things we need to figure out like for Anthropic. This is the first big foundation. We're creating and we have to learn a lot here. But I think it's just such an interesting like starting point. And I'm just super excited for these like new, when you start something new like what you can build with it. And it's in a way of building something. I'm not familiar with, so I'm super excited to learn about this and seeing what we can do with

this, like, I feel like quite unique vehicle now and like really driving the agentity like AI open source community forward and focusing on what we're, some of these companies who are very competitive with each other have coming round and where we can build things together that is just benefiting and uplifting every user in the market and every developer in the market and every builder in the market. significant. And that's what I'm really excited about to see. I definitely agree with both. I think there's a lot of opportunity to figure out what the structure does. But let me give you something more specific that I think is already in coming up, which is I want to see how agents become asynchronous.

And I'm really tired of like reading through chat sessions. And I want this to be a thing where I can go have like 20 agents working for me and actually see that come together. So I think that MCP is starting to like approach that answer. And then we want to. to figure out how to make those reference implementations and show people how they can actually get like another order of magnitude out of what AI can do for them. You don't enjoy pressing yes every five. Approve every every three seconds. Bypass, bypass. Dangerously skip permissions.

Yeah, it turned all. I'm with you on that one. I think what I look forward to is, you know, the success stories of, you know, the organization that's implemented, agentic. technology in that way and hearing how it really impacted their business. I'm looking forward to stories about MCP startups that made a ton of money. I'm looking forward to stories like in CNCF this year, CVS Pharmacy joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, right? Like a pharmacy company that's really a user and adopter of technology, sort of, you know, the late majority.

I think we're going to start seeing organizations really, really use this tech impactfully, provide feedback back to the community. And like it just the potential of the technology, I don't need to tell this crowd how huge it is, but we'll start to see that truly manifest. That is going to be cool. Well, thank you all so much for joining and congrats on the launch. Thank you. Thanks for giving us.