What is MCP, and why your assistant can suddenly do things
If you have seen the word "connector" appear in ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity in the last year or two, MCP is what is underneath it. It is worth five minutes of your time, because it is the reason assistants stopped being things that only produce text.
The short version
MCP — the Model Context Protocol — is a common language between an assistant and an outside tool. Before it, every assistant needed custom work to talk to every service. With it, a tool implements the protocol once and any assistant that speaks MCP can use it.
Practically: it is the difference between an assistant that can tell you how to publish a page and one that publishes the page.
What it actually looks like
A tool exposes a set of actions with names and descriptions. The assistant reads those descriptions, decides one is relevant to what you asked, calls it, and gets a result back. You see none of this except the outcome — and, usually, a prompt asking whether you approve.
Two flavours
- Remote — the tool lives on a server and you connect it with a URL. Nothing to install. This is what the connector settings in the big assistant apps are for.
- Local — the tool runs on your own machine, which lets it touch your files. Set up in a config file, used by developer tools.
What to check before connecting one
A connector acts with your authority. Some of this is worth a minute of attention:
- What can it actually do? The tool list is visible. Read it. A publishing tool that also wants to read your email is telling you something.
- Where do your credentials go? A well-built connector sends you to its own site to sign in, and never asks you to paste a password or an API key into the chat. Anything that asks you to type a secret into a conversation is putting it somewhere you cannot see.
- Who runs the server? A remote connector is someone else's computer. The same judgement you would apply to installing a browser extension applies here.
Why it matters more than it sounds
Most of what people wanted from assistants was never text — it was outcomes. Publish this. Send that. Book the thing. MCP is the boring plumbing that turns the first into the second, which is why every major assistant added support for it within about a year of each other.