MCP Hit 97 Million Installs. The Protocol War Is Over.

Remember when every AI company was shipping its own proprietary tool-calling format? OpenAI had function calling. Anthropic had tool use. Google had function declarations. Every integration you built was locked to one provider, and switching meant rewriting everything. That era is over. The Model Context Protocol crossed 97 million monthly SDK downloads in March 2026. For context, it launched in November 2024 with roughly 2 million downloads. That's a growth curve that makes Kubernetes look sluggish -- and Kubernetes took nearly four years to reach comparable deployment density. Why MCP Won The simplest explanation is usually the right one: MCP won because it solved a real problem with a clean abstraction. Before MCP, connecting an AI agent to a database meant writing custom code for each model provider. Want Claude to query your Postgres? Build an Anthropic tool. Want GPT-4 to query the same Postgres? Build a different OpenAI function. Want Gemini to do it? Yet another integration. Mu