MCP became the industry standard because Anthropic wasn't seen as a dominant AI lab at launch, letting rivals adopt it without fear of lock-in — a dynamic that couldn't repeat today now that Anthropic leads.

Orosz contrasts MCP's rapid adoption in late 2024, when Anthropic wasn't the frontrunner, with Google's Agent2Agent protocol, which nobody adopted because Google was seen as too dominant. ✦ AI generated

Gergely Orosz · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2026-07-08 · original ↗

Therefore, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and other players could adopt MCP without fear of lock-in, as it came from a promising, but not a dominant lab. When Google launched its Agent2Agent protocol a few months later, no major lab adopted it due to concerns about Google's dominant position.

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