Microsoft Corp. believes we’re headed toward a future where artificial intelligence-powered agents will become pervasive in enterprise computing environments, so today it’s making it easier for those agents to communicate with the third-party tools they must use to accomplish various tasks on behalf of their human users.

At its annual developer conference, Microsoft Build 2025, the company today announced support for the popular open-source Model Context Protocol in Windows 11, providing a secure and standardized framework for AI agents to connect with native Windows applications.

It says MCP support in Windows, available as a private developer preview, will act as a foundational layer for secure, interoperable agentic computing. It will help to expose the functionality of various applications to AI agents running on Windows 11 PCs.

In a blog post, David Weston, Microsoft’s corporate vice oresident of enterprise and OS security said the MCP capabilities are designed to ensure a secure and private experience with AI agents.

MCP is a lightweight, open-source protocol developed by Anthropic PBC that allows AI agents to discover and invoke computing tools such as web browsers in a standardized way, providing seamless orchestration between local and remote services. It defines three roles, including the MCP Host, which refers to AI tools such as VS Code that need to access third-party tools; MCP Clients, which initiate requests to MCP Servers; and the MCP Servers, which are lightweight services that expose the specific capabilities of an application to the agentic tool via the MCP interface.

With Windows 11, developers will be able to create more intelligent applications, leveraging MCP to take actions on behalf of users, the company explained.

MCP Servers will be made available via the new MCP Registry, which is a single, secure and trustworthy source for AI agents to access MCP services on Windows. Agents will be able to discover and download installed MCP servers directly onto client devices, so they can interact with Windows system capabilities such as the file system and Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Weston said Microsoft is putting a lot of emphasis on security with its implementation of MCP. The main guiding principle is one of “user control,” he said, and the ability of AI agents to access MCP servers will be switched off by default. Once enabled, all sensitive actions performed by the AI agent on behalf of users will be fully auditable and transparent.

MCP server access is also guided by the principle of least privilege and enforced by declarative capabilities and isolation, where application. This is to ensure that users always have full control over what privileges are granted to MCP servers,

Microsoft said it’s building MCP support for Windows in collaboration with companies including Anthropic, Figma Inc. and Perplexity AI Inc., which will all integrate their MCP capabilities for their Windows-based apps.

Anthropic said in a statement that MCP support on Windows will give a substantial boost to a thriving ecosystem of integrations built by popular services.

Joining the MCP Steering Committee

Microsoft also announced support for MCP across platforms including GitHub, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365, Azure, Azure AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel and Foundry Agents. Having fully embraced the protocol, Microsoft – along with its GitHub unit – has also joined the MCP Steering Committee to help shape its future development.

Already, they have made two key contributions to the MCP ecosystem. For instance, they have added a new identity and authorization specification that enables applications to connect to MCP servers in a more secure way. They can do so using Microsoft’s Entra ID or another trusted sign-in method, so AI agents and LLM-powered applications can access data stored on personal storage drives and cloud subscription services. According to Microsoft, this is a key step toward supporting AI agent experiences in consumer and enterprise contexts, where accountability and trust are essential considerations.

The other contribution is the MCP Registry, which allows anyone to implement public or private centralized repositories for MCP server entities. Both of the contributions are generally available now, the company said.

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