Microsoft and GitHub Join Anthropic's MCP Steering Committee
Microsoft and GitHub have joined the steering committee for Anthropic's Model-Centric Protocol (MCP), a standard designed to connect AI models with data sources. This announcement, made at Microsoft's Build 2025 conference, follows OpenAI and Google's earlier adoption of the MCP standard.
What is MCP?
MCP allows AI models to access data from various sources, including business tools, software, content repositories, and development environments. This enables developers to create two-way connections between data sources and AI applications like chatbots. Developers use "MCP servers" to expose data and "MCP clients" (e.g., apps and workflows) to connect to these servers.
Microsoft and GitHub's Commitment to MCP
Microsoft and GitHub pledge "broad first-party support" for MCP across their platforms, including Microsoft Azure and Windows 11. Windows will soon receive MCP integrations, allowing developers to expose app functionality to MCP-enabled models.
Developers will be able to wrap desired features and capabilities in their apps as MCP servers and make them available for Windows. This will include Windows system functionalities like File System, Windowing, and Windows Subsystem for Linux as MCP servers for models to interact with.
Contributions to the MCP Standard
Microsoft's identity and security teams worked with Anthropic and the MCP community to develop an updated authorization specification. This spec allows MCP-connected apps to securely connect to MCP servers using trusted sign-in methods, granting AI apps access to data and services like personal storage and subscriptions.
GitHub collaborated with the MCP steering committee to design a registry service for MCP servers. This service enables developers to implement public or private, centralized repositories for MCP server entries, improving the discovery and management of MCP implementations and configurations.
Learn more about MCP from these earlier announcements:
