OpenAI's support of Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) may be the start of easier interoperability among AI agents.
The large language model (LLM) giant announced its support for MCP for the OpenAI Agents Software Development Kit (SDK) with plans to enable it for the OpenAI API and ChatGPT Desktop.
Anthropic open sourced MCP in November 2024 to connect AI assistants to the systems where data lives--content repositories, business applications and enterprise environments. The idea behind MCP is to break down data silos and legacy systems for easier integration across connected systems.
For agentic AI, these data silos can be dealbreakers. To date, AI agents are typically pitched by vendors within a specific platform. These vendor visions typically put their own platforms at the center of the enterprise universe, but the reality is that agentic AI will need to traverse multiple systems and platforms. What was missing was a standard to enable AI agents to communicate and negotiate.
- Enterprises will spend on agentic AI, but perhaps not yet
- The data wars are just starting and agentic AI may be a trigger
- AI agents bring consumption models to SaaS: Goldilocks or headache?
- Agentic AI: Three themes to watch for 2025
- Agentic AI without process optimization, orchestration will flop
- AI? Whatever. It's all about the first party data
- Enterprise AI: Here are the trends to know right now
Perhaps, OpenAI's support will make MCP standard. What remains to be seen is whether the hyperscale cloud providers and SaaS giants get behind MCP. Given Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft are supporting MCP it's likely others will have to follow or create dueling standards for AI agent connections.
On X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the MCP support. MCP also was just updated with an authorization framework based on OAuth 2.1, streamable HTTP transport and support for JSON-RPC batching. Microsoft is also supporting MCP and launched a new Playwright-MCP server that enables AI agents to browse the web and interact with sites.
Box CEO Aaron Levie, who has been talking AI system interoperability, on X and LinkedIn said the OpenAI MCP support is critical for coordinating across platforms. "As AI Agents from multiple platforms coordinate work, AI interoperability is going to be critical," said Levie.
Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:
"The question of 2025 will be - will the LLM be in charge of its enterprise tooling, or will enterprise software vendors build their own pre-director to go to LLM vs. more traditional deterministic algorithms. The latter will give the vendor (and this the customer) more control & there former is easier from an R&D perspective, but a vendor chosing the LLM route will have invest in seeding tools for multiple LLMs. MCP may become the standard to simplify this issue."
