Topic of Week: Model Context Protocol (MCP) and GraphQL: The Future of AI-API Integration

API Design, Strategy & Governance
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Hello Apollo Community!

:speech_balloon: I wanted to start a conversation about the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and its potential impact on GraphQL and Apollo’s future product roadmap.

For those who haven’t been following, MCP is an open standard recently introduced by Anthropic that provides a standardized way for LLMs to interact with external tools and data sources - including GraphQL APIs. It has been recently adopted by OpenAI.

Why This Matters for GraphQL

AI Chat and agents need standardized ways to access data. GraphQL’s introspective capabilities, precise data fetching, and strong typing make it seem like an ideal fit for AI interactions - but the lack of standards to date meant lots of custom code/pipeline. MCP can be a way to solve these challenges

I’m particularly interested in exploring:

  • Enterprise-grade MCP servers for GraphQL APIs
  • GraphOS integration possibilities
  • Development tooling for MCP-GraphQL implementations

Questions for the Community

  • Are you already experimenting with MCP and GraphQL? What are you working on?
  • What challenges do you foresee in making GraphQL APIs accessible to AI systems?
  • What features would you want in Apollo’s potential MCP tooling?
  • Are there specific use cases where you see MCP-GraphQL integration being particularly valuable?

I’m excited to hear your thoughts, experiences, and questions on this emerging standard and how it might shape the future of GraphQL!

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Great topic. Thanks for kicking this off @kevin_chu. I’ve been digging into MCP and have heard from a number of community members that their teams are too.

Keen to hear what the community is thinking!

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I haven’t done much with MCP but I like the idea of using AI to access the graph in addition to using AI behind the graph. My initial experimentation with AI and GraphQL was a traditional interaction between the client and the graph with AI nested in a subgraph, but I’m interested in following the idea of putting AI in front of the graph, too.

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