The MCP ecosystem is growing faster than the GPT Store ever did
A year after launch, there are more than 1,200 open-source MCP servers on GitHub. The protocol is winning where GPT actions stalled.
Model Context Protocol — Anthropic’s open standard for connecting AI clients to tools and data — has quietly become the fastest-growing AI protocol in history.
A year after the initial spec, our index tracks 1,200+ open-source servers on GitHub, plus a growing number of hosted offerings from Supabase, Vercel, Cloudflare, Figma, Notion, and Linear. Compare that to the GPT Store, which peaked at around 3M custom GPTs but suffered from discoverability rot and limited protocol generality.
The reason MCP is working: it’s model-agnostic, protocol-first, and doesn’t lock you into a single client. Claude, Cursor, Continue, and a growing list of IDEs all speak MCP natively.
Inference Index