Intel / article

What is an MCP server?

Source: browserbase.com
Author: Browserbase
Date: Published Aug 4, 2026

Context

An server gives an AI application a standard way to discover and use external capabilities. The server describes available tools; the application can request an operation and return its result to the model. The protocol documentation explains this discovery-and-call process, which lets compatible applications reuse an integration.

Browserbase's browser-server example makes the arrangement concrete: the server exposes actions for navigating, interacting with pages, and extracting information from a hosted browser. MCP supplies the connection between the AI application and those browser operations.

Terms in this piece · Glossary

MCP — The Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets any AI assistant plug into any tool or data source without custom integration code.

Key quotes

“An MCP server is a program that exposes tools, data, and actions to an AI model through the Model Context Protocol, a single open standard that any MCP-aware client can call.”

“Anthropic introduced MCP in November 2024 as an open standard, and the ecosystem has since grown to thousands of public servers.”

“It is the difference between a model that can only describe a website and one that can actually operate it.”

“The point of standardizing this is reuse.”

Read the source browserbase.com