USB was developed by a big alliance of major software and hardware vendors. This stuff on the other hand always feels like Anthropic is just scared of dropping out of the news cycle because other companies are constantly releasing models or making them cheaper, while they currently have nothing real to offer themselves. MCP was a complete clusterfuck an announced at a time when OpenAI absolutely dominated with reasoning models while Anthropic's first reasoning model was still months off. The only reason it took off is because noone else bothered to make something better and managers loved it so much that everyone else got dragged on board because of demand.
> The only reason it took off is because noone else bothered to make something better
Yes, and that alone is sufficient reason for them to do it. They did it with MCP. They did it with Skills. OpenAI did it with tools. All of these had many months, sometimes even years, of existing prior art. All of these could've been done much better, too. But "worse is better", first one to get a properly packaged MVP out the door and into spotlight wins, and then everyone is using that.
If OpenAI has set the API standard more or less without even trying just by offering one of the most straightforward ways of interacting with LLMs via http. To the point that they got stuck with this legacy thing now that they and many others keeps reasoning traces private on their servers, which actually hinders future adoption. If they had forced their function calling and structured output API standards just a bit more in response to MCP, they probably could have smothered it in the crib. If this part was standardised more, MCP would offer hardly any extra benefit.
