Google and Microsoft Align Five Giants Against Anthropic’s MCP and Reopen the Protocol War

The Information published on Monday (13) a report that consolidates the design of the new enterprise protocol alliance. Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, and ServiceNow have signed support for a common standard to connect AI agents to corporate data, with parallel adherence from Cisco, Databricks, GitHub, GoDaddy, Hugging Face, and NVIDIA. The protocol, named Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD), was announced on June 18, but the material published on Monday presents the strategic reasons behind the coalition: reducing dependency on Anthropic’s MCP, which has become the de facto standard in 18 months.

The MCP (Model Context Protocol) has, according to public data from the Linux Foundation consortium, about 97 million SDK downloads per month and over 9,400 public servers. Anthropic launched the specification in November 2024 and donated the repository to the Agentic AI Foundation in December 2025. Each major AI provider, including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Microsoft, has already implemented native support. The donation was tactically effective but does not eliminate the point of tension: Anthropic still exerts editorial influence over the evolution of the standard.

What Changes in the Pipeline

The ARD does not replace the MCP. It operates on a layer above. If the MCP is the USB-C port that allows the agent to connect to a business tool, the ARD is the discovery service that informs the agent which port to use in each data context. In practice, the ARD runs over corporate identity systems (Azure AD, Okta, Google Workspace) and data catalogs (Snowflake Horizon, Databricks Unity, ServiceNow AI Platform). The declared goal is to enable companies to orchestrate agents without going through infrastructure not controlled by the platforms where the data already resides.

For the CIO, the concrete vocabulary is this. With ARD, an agentic data query that currently goes through Anthropic’s MCP layer can run directly under Microsoft Purview or Google Sensitive Data Protection's control. The declared gain is governance. The unspoken gain is to reduce the implicit tax of running enterprise agents on a stack standardized by a competitor.

The TCP/IP Parallel Is Not Rhetorical

The last two protocol wars, TCP/IP in the 1980s and HTTP in the 1990s, decided who controls infrastructure economics for decades. Salesforce holds customer relationship data for over 150,000 companies globally. Snowflake stores the analytical warehouse for over 11,000 clients, including 700 from the Fortune 2000. ServiceNow operates the IT workflow of 8,400 global companies. Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure together control 42% of the cloud infrastructure market, according to Synergy Research Q2 2026. If the five align on a common agentic discovery standard, the default for any corporate implementation becomes ARD, not MCP.

Anthropic has an operational counterargument. According to data disclosed by the company in June, more than 60% of MCP servers in production in May were running open-source code contributed by third parties, and less than 15% of the traffic goes through endpoints controlled by Anthropic. An internal document from Databricks leaked to The Information in May details that the ARD architecture relies on proprietary connectors by vendor, which reintroduces the same lock-in that the MCP was born to attack. Cutting from the presentation a vertical standardization in the name of "governance" is easy to sell to the board. Running two protocols in parallel is not.

Where the Buyer Really Decides

In the United States, the decisive battle will be in the EA (Enterprise Agreements) contracts that Microsoft and Google are renegotiating with the federal government and large banks between October and December. If ARD enters as a FedRAMP High compliance prerequisite by the next quarter, the platform logic sorts itself out.

In Germany, the scenario is conservative. The BSI and Bundesbank are already signaling a preference for protocols submitted to an independent standardization body. The MCP is under the Linux Foundation. The ARD has its governance process hanging in an ad hoc consortium, giving Anthropic an immediate contractual advantage in financial contracts regulated by DORA.

In Japan, MUFG and SoftBank are operating pilot projects with Databricks and Microsoft. The adoption of ARD has a real cost of reengineering on implementations that began in February on MCP. The two institutions have yet to comment on the new coalition.

What Next Week Reveals

The counterattack from Anthropic and OpenAI is not expected to be their own protocol. The two companies have already announced the first MCP Enterprise Extensions, submitted to the Linux Foundation in June, with transparent governance. If the hyperscalers lower the price of ARD within the EA without additional charges, corporate buyers will choose based on friction. If ARD comes as an upsell, MCP maintains inertia. The battle is not about standards. It is about bundling.