Agentic commerce
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
MCP is an open specification published by Anthropic that standardises how an AI agent discovers the tools a system exposes and calls them with typed arguments.
MCP is not a commerce protocol. It says nothing about carts, feeds or payment. It is the layer beneath those: the mechanism by which an agent learns that a capability exists at all and how to invoke it.
It also carries no permission model. Scoping, idempotency and audit are entirely the responsibility of the server implementing it — which is why an MCP endpoint in front of an admin API with a full-access token is a liability rather than a feature.
In depth: What is MCP in ecommerce?