OpenAI & Anthropic Unveil MCP Apps, Beyond Text
OpenAI & Anthropic’s MCP Apps turns AI chat into visual dashboards—HTML mini-apps inside your prompt, no code needed.
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As the “neural hub” connecting AI models to the vast digital ecosystem, the MCP protocol has become an indispensable infrastructure for AI Agents. However, for a long time, MCP’s interactions have been limited to text and structured data, and this “blind men and the elephant” experience has restricted the implementation of more complex application scenarios.
Change is happening.
Recently, the MCP community officially proposed the MCP Apps proposal (SEP-1865), aiming to fill this critical puzzle piece: standardizing support for interactive user interfaces (UI), enabling MCP servers to directly provide visual operation interfaces to hosts.
Specifically, the MCP Apps Extension introduces a standardised pattern for declaring UI resources, linking them to tools, and enabling bidirectional communication between embedded interfaces and host applications.
To explain in simpler terms: the old MCP was like customer service that could only communicate by “text messaging” - it could only send you text or data code; while MCP Apps upgrades this customer service to an intelligent assistant that can send you “mini-programs.” Imagine when you ask AI to analyze server logs, instead of spitting out a bunch of boring JSON text, it directly conjures up a visual dashboard in the chat window, and you can even click on charts to filter and zoom; when you need to configure parameters, it directly pops up a form for you to check off, rather than making you input complex commands. This allows AI to no longer just be a chat companion, but to truly possess interactive capabilities similar to an operating system’s graphical interface.