Everyone calls MCP “just an API calling layer for AI”. That framing is wrong — and it’s exactly why the “we already have Swagger” objection keeps coming up. Both things need unpacking.
What MCP Actually Is MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. Anthropic announced it in November 2024 [1], and by December 2025 it was donated to the Linux Foundation under the Agentic AI Foundation, co-founded with Block and OpenAI [2]. That adoption speed alone is worth noting.