Anthropic 发布模型上下文协议 MCP,研究其研究论文与 GitHub 仓库的增长与采用情况
A Two-Dimensional Study of the Model Context Protocol: Publication and Adoption
Anthropic 发布的模型上下文协议(MCP)是连接大模型与外部工具的标准,这篇研究详细分析了它的研究论文和 GitHub 仓库的增长情况,对想了解 MCP 应用的开发者很有参考价值。
Anthropic 在 2024 年 11 月发布模型上下文协议(MCP),该协议标准化了大型语言模型如何连接外部工具和数据源。研究分析了 802 篇相关研究论文和 33,319 个 GitHub 仓库,发现两者在 2025 年 1 月开始快速增长,并在 2026 年 3 月达到峰值。研究指出,大多数(57.8%)研究论文和几乎全部(93.7%)仓库将 MCP 作为一项使能技术,而非直接用于分析、评估、扩展或安全。
A Two-Dimensional Study of the Model Context Protocol: Publication and Adoption
The Model Context Protocol (MCP), released by Anthropic in November 2024, standardizes how large language model applications connect to external tools and data sources. Despite MCP's rapid growth, no study has jointly characterized its emergence in the research literature, its adoption on GitHub and the relationship between them. We address this gap with a longitudinal, two-dimensional study of 802 MCP-related publications and 33,319 GitHub repositories. We characterize their growth and identify their application domains via BERTopic and usage contexts via a human-validated GPT-5.6-Luna classifier. We find that publications and repositories began rapid growth within a month of each other in 2025, and peaked together in March 2026. Notably, a second growth wave alone accounts for 49.5% of the GitHub repositories. Most publications (57.8%) and nearly all repositories (93.7%) use MCP as an enabling technology rather than for analyzing, evaluating, extending, or securing it directly. Among repositories, the latter category concentrates almost entirely in one general-purpose topic, while applied usage spreads into product-specific niches. Finally, we provide an overview of the MCP landscape and recommendations to researchers and practitioners in this field.