Module 1 · Section 1 of 6

Claude is good at thinking. It’s less good at knowing what’s in your calendar, or what emails arrived this morning, or what’s currently in your database. Not because it can’t reason about those things — it can — but because it can’t see them. By default, Claude only knows what you put in the chat window.

MCP fixes that.

Model Context Protocol is an open standard that lets Claude connect to external systems. Tools, data sources, services. Instead of you copying content into a prompt, Claude can reach out and fetch it directly. Instead of you running a command and pasting the result, Claude can run the command itself.

It’s like plugins, but built on an open standard that anyone can implement. Anthropic published the spec, other companies adopted it, and now there’s an ecosystem of servers that connect Claude to the things you already use.