OpenAI adopts Anthropic's MCP protocol — prompting remains critical skill¶
Insight: At OpenAI DevDay 2025, OpenAI announced adoption of Anthropic's MCP protocol for tool connectivity in their new AgentKit platform. This is a major validation of MCP as the emerging standard — even OpenAI, a direct competitor to Anthropic, chose to adopt rather than create a competing protocol. Additionally, OpenAI emphasized that prompting remains a critical skill despite earlier predictions it would become obsolete; prompt optimization is now a core part of their agent building platform.
Detail: AgentKit includes Agent SDK, visual Agent Builder, evaluations, and deployment tools. The Apps SDK inverts the traditional website-chatbot paradigm by embedding apps directly within ChatGPT. Key insight from the interview: visual agent builders are becoming essential as workflows grow to span dozens of nodes — pure code-based agent definitions don't scale in complexity. OpenAI is dogfooding these tools, with their own customer support already powered by AgentKit.
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Related: existing entry "MCP origin story — solving the M×N integration problem" in external/mcp.md — CORROBORATES