I think they're doing this so they can have months of advanced notice of how the protocol will look, to post-train their models to be the only ones with the ability to interact with this protocol on the day it becomes public.

It's like creating conditions for a race where they structurally have months of advance. And realistically they have a credible shot at establishing the standard due to their weight in the industry, and control of the most popular AI distribution method (Claude).

So they create the race, knowing the race is what will likely establish the standard, and using some pretext to prevent other competitive athletes from training for it in advance. Other athletes only get to start when the gun fires.

I think I agree. I find it a little bit annoying that they do not start by a survey of the existing landscape, discuss the issues and what works well, and spend the effort to show that they can indeed to be trusted as the authority behind such a protocol expected to become standard. For MCP, it started very messy, but from what I understand it was developed by a small team within the company working on internal tooling, for their own use case, I think it’s reasonable to expect something a bit awkward, I don’t think they expected its success

It's a bit of both for Anthropic I think, sometimes cutting edge and quite interesting or just good improvements, sometimes ignoring best practices either recently established or known for decades. Obvious to see where the smart people are in high places at the company.