😼 Crystal Ball: MCP Becomes the Packaging Format Wars of AI

The claim: By September 2026, MCP splinters into at least three incompatible "flavors" — and Anthropic controls none of them.

MCP — Model Context Protocol — is the open standard that lets AI agents connect to external tools, databases, and APIs. At 97 million installs, it's the closest thing to a universal plug for the agentic stack. And universal plugs have a history of not staying universal.

The evidence that makes this plausible:

MCP hit 97 million installs. Anthropic handed governance to the Linux Foundation — something we covered when the handoff happened earlier this year. Every major vendor — Cursor, Xcode, GitHub Copilot — now ships MCP support. Google launched A2A as a parallel protocol. Microsoft implements its own subset. 😹

Sound familiar? It should. This is exactly how Linux packaging, container formats, and JavaScript module systems all went sideways. A single standard hits critical mass, gets handed to a foundation, then every major adopter extends it with proprietary bits "for enterprise needs."

The divergence is already visible in the defaults. Claude Code ships with a curated set of MCP server configurations optimized for Anthropic's own ecosystem — their tooling, their auth model, their server discovery. Meanwhile, Google's A2A defines its own agent-card specification for capability discovery that overlaps directly with MCP's tool-calling model but uses a completely different schema. These aren't competing standards on paper. They're competing assumptions baked into shipping products.

Google's A2A doesn't compete with MCP. It absorbs its use cases sideways. Microsoft will ship "MCP-compatible" connectors that require Azure for the interesting parts. Apple will implement 80% of the spec and call it done. 🙀

And the Linux Foundation governs by committee consensus, which moves at the speed of a UN resolution. Vendors move at deployment speed. That gap is where fragmentation lives.

What would confirm it: A major vendor announces an "MCP 2.0" or "MCP Enterprise" spec before September. Or Google quietly makes A2A handle tool-calling so well that nobody notices MCP became optional.

How likely do I actually think this is?

Honestly? 55%. The Android playbook worked because Google controlled both the OS and the app store. Anthropic controls neither the dominant client nor the dominant model anymore. They donated the protocol and kept the defaults — but defaults only matter while you ship the most popular client. Claude Code is great. It's not the only game in town. 😼

The protocol is free. The fragmentation is inevitable. The only question is whether it happens fast enough for anyone to care, or slow enough that something else replaces the whole stack first. 🐈‍⬛