Europe 2026
The Future of MCP — David Soria Parra, Anthropic
Overview
This talk explores the evolution and future of the Message Communication Protocol (MCP), emphasizing its role in enabling agents to achieve full connectivity. The core thesis is that MCP is a crucial connective tissue, allowing agents to interact with various applications and services, moving beyond simple coding tasks to handle complex knowledge work. The future of agent development in 2026 hinges on seamless integration of MCP with other tools like CLIs and skills to achieve robust functionality.
Who should watch
- AI Engineers building agentic systems
- Product Managers defining agent capabilities
- Developers looking to integrate AI agents with existing applications
- Anyone interested in the future of agent connectivity and tooling
Key takeaways
- MCP servers can ship applications and tools, enabling agents to interact with interfaces and services across different platforms like ChatGPT, VS Code Cursor, and cloud environments.
- The MCP ecosystem has seen rapid growth, reaching 110 million monthly downloads, indicating its widespread adoption as a common standard for inter-agent communication.
- Future agent development will focus on general knowledge work, requiring agents to connect to multiple SaaS applications and shared drives, highlighting the importance of connectivity.
- Effective agent development in 2026 involves a combination of skills, MCP, and CLIs, with each serving distinct purposes in the connectivity stack.
- Progressive discovery is a key pattern for managing tool loading in agent harnesses, deferring tool loading until the model requires them to reduce context window usage.
- Programmatic tool calling, or code mode, allows for more efficient composition of agent actions by having the model write and execute scripts rather than making sequential tool calls.
- Designing MCP servers for agents, rather than simply converting REST APIs, leads to more effective and agent-native interactions.
- Future MCP developments include a stateless transport protocol for better scalability, improved asynchronous task primitives for agent-to-agent communication, and enhanced SDKs.
Notable quotes
MCP applications are agents shipping their own interface not through a plugin, SDK, or hardcoded into the product, but served over an MCP server.
*The most important part for them for an agent is connectivity.*
*The right thing of course is that it always depends, and there's a real a big connectivity stack, and there's a right tool for the right job.*
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