MCP is a Trapdoor

Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a new technical framework designed to standardize context sharing between applications and LLMs. At its core, MCP allows developers to seamlessly manage, preserve, and transport user and application-specific context across different AI models and interfaces. It sounds like a developer’s dream: a common standard to simplify integration, ensure continuity, and abstract away complexity.

But beware, if you are an app builder, adopting MCP too early might be borderline suicide for your app.

When you embrace MCP, you risk abstracting away the very details that make your user experience distinct and valuable. You commoditize your core functionality, effectively turning your unique user experience into something replaceable. Your product becomes just another node in an interchangeable web of applications that users can switch between without friction.

Think about what that actually means: by making context portable and standardizing how applications interact with LLMs, MCP unintentionally encourages your users to see your app as fungible. Once users learn they can effortlessly shift their entire interaction context from your app to another MCP-compliant app, you’ve trained them to churn.

Even worse, you’ve positioned yourself between two very challenging forces:

• Protocol Capture from Above: Aggregators like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere could leverage MCP’s standardization to consolidate their control. You might end up spending most of your energy navigating their changing APIs, politics, pricing, and priorities instead of innovating your own core product.
• Feature Creep from Below: Because your core UX is standardized, competitors will easily clone your functionality and then incrementally layer new features on top. To survive, you’re forced into a cycle of feature creep, diluting your core experience as you race to differentiate again.

MCP acts as a trapdoor. Once you step through it, you’re no longer competing purely on product innovation or user experience. Instead, you’re competing in a crowded market dictated by protocol politics. Your strategic autonomy shrinks dramatically as you become dependent on whoever controls the aggregation layer.

Early-stage products especially should think twice before adopting MCP. Your primary advantage early on is your ability to build differentiation through unique interactions, tailored context management, and nuanced UX choices. Standardizing these advantages prematurely means you surrender critical leverage.

That’s not to say MCP is without value. It has clear benefits for mature applications or certain platform-level use cases. But adopting it prematurely, before you’ve deeply entrenched your value proposition, is risky. You may end up exchanging your hard-won uniqueness for a seat at someone else’s increasingly crowded table.

Choose carefully: once you step through the MCP trapdoor, it’s difficult to step back out.