Tuesday Jul 14
STRATEGYGoogle

Five Giants Challenge Anthropic's Standard

14JUL
MCPRIVAL5 VS 1

Connecting AI agents to your tools just became a turf war. Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, and ServiceNow are backing a rival to Anthropic's MCP. MCP quietly became the default plumbing for AI agents.

MCP lets an AI agent plug into any business tool with one shared protocol. Anthropic open-sourced it, and it became the default almost by accident.

The five companies run the software where business data actually lives. None of them want to build on a rival's foundation. So they are shipping a competing standard instead.

Anthropic still has an 18-month head start with developers. But a five-company alliance can out-market and out-integrate almost anyone.

full brief & sources

⚡ Why this matters

  • Whoever owns the agent-to-software plumbing controls where the next lock-in happens.
  • This is the clearest sign yet that the model race and the infrastructure race are splitting apart.
  • Anthropic built the default without owning the incumbents' turf, and now the incumbents are pushing back.

🔍 What happened

  • Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, and ServiceNow agreed to back a shared standard for connecting AI agents to business software.
  • The move directly counters Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, or MCP, which has become the default connector standard over the past 18 months.
  • MCP lets AI clients like Claude or ChatGPT call tools and data sources through one common interface.
  • Snowflake and ServiceNow both run infrastructure that would otherwise depend on a protocol Anthropic controls.
  • Google separately pushed its own Agent2Agent, or A2A, protocol at Cloud Next, adding to the crowded standards field.

💬 Smart takes

  • Industry framing: 'The giants do not love building on a competitor's foundation.'
  • MCP adoption read: Model Context Protocol has 'rapidly become the default standard for connecting AI clients to external tools.'
  • Skeptic: standards wars in software usually end with the most-adopted option winning regardless of who backs the alternative.

🧭 Where this goes

  1. LikelyMCP keeps its developer-adoption lead through 2026 despite the new coalition.
  2. Likelyenterprise software vendors add support for both standards rather than picking one.
  3. Possiblethe new standard wins default status inside Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Snowflake's own products specifically.
  4. Wild Cardthe standards fragment permanently, forcing every AI vendor to support both.

🥄 The Spoon Take

MCP's real advantage was never the spec. It was showing up first and getting good enough. A five-company alliance can out-spend Anthropic, but it cannot un-adopt eighteen months of developer habit overnight.

🤔 Pushback

Standards wars usually get settled by whoever ships the best developer experience, not whoever has the biggest logos in the press release.

·CryptoBriefing - Rival standard vs MCP·TheNextWeb - Google's A2A push·andrew.ooo - MCP adoption state