Five enterprise giants just built a wall around MCP

For 18 months, Anthropic's Model Context Protocol has been the thing everyone quietly agreed on. You want to plug a tool into an agent, you speak MCP. It won by being early, open, and good enough. That consensus is now contested. Per The Information, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, and ServiceNow agreed to back a common AI backend-software protocol, framed explicitly as a counter to MCP (Crypto Briefing).

Read the roster again. Those five own most of the enterprise data, most of the workflow surfaces, and a big chunk of the cloud your agents run on. This isn't a startup floating an RFC nobody adopts. When Salesforce and ServiceNow decide what protocol their platforms speak natively, that decision propagates into thousands of enterprise stacks by default.

The part I can't stop thinking about: the same companies also co-participate in the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation. So they cooperate in the foundation and knife-fight on the protocol layer at the same time. That's not hypocrisy, it's how standards wars actually work. You keep a seat at the neutral table so you're not caught out, and you push your own thing where the leverage is.

For builders, the annoying truth is you now have a protocol bet to make, and the "safe" default got less safe. If you wired everything to MCP because it was the obvious standard, you're fine today and exposed in a year. My read: keep building on MCP, because it has real adoption and the tooling exists, but abstract your tool layer so a protocol swap is a config change, not a rewrite. Treat the connection protocol like you'd treat a database driver. You don't hardcode your app to Postgres wire format. Don't hardcode your agent to one tool protocol either.

The bigger signal is that "connect a tool to an agent" is now valuable enough that the incumbents want to own the pipe. That only happens when the category is real. Watch whether this alliance ships a spec with working SDKs or just a press release. The first tells you it's a threat. The second tells you it's a hedge.