With today’s rollout of developer betas for iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS Tahoe 26.1, Apple began to lay the groundwork for adopting Anthropic’s protocol for agentic AI. Here’s what this means.
What’s MCP again?
MCP, or Model Context Protocol, was proposed last November by Anthropic, and quickly became the industry’s standard interface between AI systems and traditional platforms. In a nutshell, it wants to be the AI equivalent of what HTTP is to the web, or SMTP is to email.
Here’s how Anthropic puts it:
As AI assistants gain mainstream adoption, the industry has invested heavily in model capabilities, achieving rapid advances in reasoning and quality. Yet even the most sophisticated models are constrained by their isolation from data—trapped behind information silos and legacy systems. Every new data source requires its own custom implementation, making truly connected systems difficult to scale. MCP addresses this challenge. It provides a universal, open standard for connecting AI systems with data sources, replacing fragmented integrations with a single protocol. The result is a simpler, more reliable way to give AI systems access to the data they need.
Since its announcement, MCP has been widely adopted by companies and platforms such as Zapier, Notion, Google, Figma, OpenAI, Salesforce, and many others.
The result is a universal pathway for AI assistants to plug into APIs and data sources, and autonomously interact with them based on a request, or prompt, made by the user.
Here are a few examples offered by the ModelContextProtocol.io on what MCP can enable:
Agents can access your Google Calendar and Notion, acting as a more personalized AI assistant.
Claude Code can generate an entire web app using a Figma design.
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