The Future of MCP — David Soria Parra, Anthropic

Summary
David Soria Parra, a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic and co-creator of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), presents a keynote at AI Engineer Europe in London on the evolution and future roadmap of MCP. He discusses the shift from local coding agents to enterprise knowledge-work agents, explains the connectivity stack (Skills, MCP, and CLI/Computer use), and details upcoming harness techniques and protocol updates including MCP Apps, progressive tool discovery, and stateless transport.

What is shown

• [00:16] Live demo of an MCP App in Claude: Claude renders an interactive Excalidraw canvas diagram of a Raspberry Pi 5 directly inside the chat UI over an MCP server connection.
• [01:59] Slide depicting the 12-month MCP evolution timeline from open-sourcing in November 2024 to MCP Apps in Q1 2026.
• [02:28] Slide highlighting MCP ecosystem growth metrics (110M+ monthly SDK downloads).
• [03:58] Slide diagramming the agent evolution curve: 2024 demos, 2025 coding agents, and 2026 knowledge work agents.
• [05:18] The connectivity stack framework: Skills (domain knowledge), MCP (integration protocol), and CLI / Computer use (Unix-style system access).
• [08:02] Progressive tool discovery comparison in Claude Code: reducing tool schema overhead from 56,000+ tokens per turn to ~9,000 tokens loaded on demand.
• [09:40] Programmatic tool calling / Code Mode examples showing a REPL environment composing MCP calls across Linear and Notion with structured outputs.
• [13:42] MCP 2026 protocol roadmap slide covering stateless transport, improved tasks, SDK v2.0 releases, cross-app access, server-cards discovery, and skills over MCP.
• [18:05] Claude interactive UI demo rendering an SVG camera diaphragm simulator and an interactive Zipf's Law visualization via an MCP App.

Claims & numbers

• The presenter claims MCP SDK downloads exceed 110 million per month across Python, TypeScript, and other languages.
• The presenter claims React took roughly twice as long as MCP to achieve a comparable download volume.
• According to the presenter, using progressive discovery via tool search reduced Claude Code's tool context consumption from over 56,000 tokens every turn to approximately 9,000 tokens loaded on demand.
• The presenter outlines MCP milestones: open-sourced in November 2024, remote servers in March 2025, authorization in June 2025, elicitation in September 2025, tasks in December 2025, and MCP Apps in Q1 2026.
• The presenter notes that Google submitted a proposal for a stateless transport protocol for MCP scheduled to land around June 2026 to improve scaling on serverless platforms such as Cloud Run and Kubernetes.
• TypeScript SDK v2.0 and Python SDK v2.0 are slated for release based on community architectural patterns (such as FastMCP).

Notable quotes

• [00:48] "An agent shipping its own interface — through a protocol."
• [03:46] "2026 is the year agents go to production."
• [17:49] "2026 is all about connectivity. The best agents use every available method."

Assessment
This is a conference keynote presentation and technical overview delivered by an Anthropic engineer and protocol co-creator. The on-screen demos of MCP Apps and context benchmark figures reflect real software running inside Claude desktop and terminal harness environments.

Described by gemini-3.8-flash on 2026-09-29 from the video's audio and frames.