Microsoft goes all in on Anthropic's MCP standard for safer AI agent deployments

smirkdingo/Getty Images As AI agent fever spreads, support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), an AI data connection standard created by Anthropic last year, is growing -- and Microsoft is the latest to join in, emphasizing security. Also: What is Model Context Protocol? The emerging standard bridging AI and data, explained The company joined the MCP Steering Committee last week alongside GitHub, announcing support for the protocol across GitHub, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365, Azure and Azure AI, Foundry Agents, Windows 11, and Semantic Kernel. On Monday, as part of the company's annual Build developer event, Microsoft announced two new initiatives to foster "secure, at-scale adoption" of MCP as developers build with agents across various platforms. "Windows 11 will support developers building intelligent applications that want to use MCP and generative AI capabilities to build applications centered around generative AI," Microsoft said, including autonomous agentic frameworks. The co ... Read full article.