Anthropic’s Alex Albert (Claude Relations), John Welsh (Engineering, MCP team), and Michael Cohen (Engineering, Claude API team) discuss the origins of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard for connecting AI applications to external systems, best practices for getting started with MCP, and how MCP and Claude work together to enable more powerful agentic systems.
00:00 - Introductions
00:30 - What is MCP?
1:30 - The origins of MCP
2:50 - Open sourcing MCP
5:00 - Remote MCP support
6:15: MCP registries
7:40 - Favorite MCPs: Context7 & Playwright
10:40 - Using the Claude API MCP connector
11:50 - Prompt engineering with MCP
14:20 - Best practices for managing context and tools with MCP
18:20 - How John and Michael use MCP servers for project management, home automation, and more
20:00 - Understanding the “emergent” behaviors when Claude and MCP servers work together
22:50 - The future of MCP: growth of the protocol and ecosystem

Learn more about MCP: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro
Learn more about the Claude Developer Platform: https://www.claude.com/platform/api
Learn more about how to write effective tools for AI agents: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/writing-tools-for-agents