It is not only an Anthropic thing, and it works with any model that supports function calling, which DeepSeek did not when it first launched. That probably has changed since, but I haven't looked!
I don't like it. I don't like the OpenAI API all that much either but at least it's lightweight. I think MCP would fit better on mcp.anthropic.com to go along with their email address mcp-support@anthropic.com at the bottom of https://modelcontextprotocol.io/
I wish they'd done a smaller launch of it and gather feedback rather than announcing a supposed new standard which feels a lot like a wrapper.
This here is atrocious https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/quickstart-resources... It includes this mcp PyPI package which pulls in a bunch of other PyPI dependencies. And for some reason they say "we recommend uv". How is that related to just setting up a tool for an AI to use?
That example code on DeepSeek doesn't actually include the logic to call a weather API? It just puts a fake answer back in, and you've got to handle the process manually.
The pyproject.toml in the Model Context Protocol example is just showing the new, "best" way to distribute and install Python projects and dependencies. If you haven't used uv before, it makes working with Python projects substantially better.
The Model Context Protocol server lets the model autonomously use the tool and incorporate its result. It's a much cleaner (imo obviously) separation of tool definition and execution.
