• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 31, 2025

Google CEO Sundar Pichai took to X during the weekend to crowdsource opinion whether AI platforms should use the open standard Model Context Protocol (MCP).

“To MCP or not to MCP, that's the question,” Pichai wrote. “Lmk in comments.”

In the comments section of his X thread, many people shared their opinions on the open standard developed by Anthropic in 2024. It allows AI models to connect to a variety of data sources and apps.

The technology connects AI assistants to systems where data lives, including content repositories, business tools, and development environments. Its aim is to help frontier models produce better, more relevant responses.

“Do it for the developers,” Adam Holt, founder and CEO of Rapido in New Zealand, wrote.

Imagine you have one universal plug that fits all your devices – that's essentially what the MCP is for AI, wrote Addy Osmani, engineer at Google working on Chrome, in a blog post.

Corey Coto, chief executive and co-founder at Kaizen Insights, thought the idea would move AI into the next generation of interoperability.

“Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google would create a massive step-function increase in developer impact,” Coto wrote. “The substrate or Web 2.0 and the Social Web can be wired together. We just have to convince AMZN and META to join too.”

An engineer that goes by the tag Kache on X believes Google could come up with a better way to connect the agents and models.

“Come up with a better interface.” He wrote, and “please let your guys cook,” and then Google could “name it something that isn’t an acronym.”

Some thought MCP insufficient and not very enlightening. Another said it’s a good step, but “ultimately the by-product of a chat host wanting to maintain center focus and control. we need a third option, agnostic tools, authorization, and context you take with you from vendor to vendor.”

Using MCP would give Google a head start, but about half of the comments suggested the company start with something new. The post shows how Google is preparing to allows AI models to connect to many different apps and data sources consistently.