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Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, and ServiceNow back a shared agent protocol to rival Anthropic's MCP

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

Five enterprise giants agreed to co-support a shared AI agent connectivity protocol, framing it as a direct counter to Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, which has built roughly 18 months of ecosystem lead.

Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, and ServiceNow back a shared agent protocol to rival Anthropic's MCP

Five companies that collectively own the cloud, data warehouse, CRM, and IT service management layers of most enterprise stacks agreed to co-support a shared AI agent connectivity protocol, per a July 13 report in The Information. The coalition is explicit about the target: Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, which has spent roughly 18 months becoming the default tool-connection standard for AI agents.

What happened

Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, and ServiceNow agreed to back a common backend protocol governing how AI agents connect to enterprise data, tools, and each other, according to The Information (as reported by Tech-Reader Blog's July 13 roundup). The report framed the agreement directly as a counter to Anthropic's MCP.

The same five companies also participate in the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, a neutral body pursuing open agent standards. That dual track is notable: they are cooperating through the Foundation while publicly counter-positioning against a competitor's standard in the market at the same time.

Google's involvement connects to work it already announced at Cloud Next in April 2026. At that event, Google introduced the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol at v1.0 in production at 150 organizations, per The Next Web. Whether A2A is the specific backbone of this coalition agreement, or whether the July 13 announcement covers something broader, remains unclear: The Information's full reporting is behind a paywall, and no public protocol specification has appeared yet.

Why it matters

The signatory list is what gives this announcement credibility. Google and Microsoft own the cloud infrastructure most enterprises run on. Salesforce and ServiceNow sit inside the day-to-day workflow of CRM and IT operations. Snowflake holds the enterprise data layer. A protocol backed by all five gives enterprise IT buyers a credible alternative to building agent infrastructure on Anthropic's standard.

The harder question is whether market alignment translates to adoption. MCP's 18-month head start represents real developer tooling, integration work, and organizational knowledge that does not evaporate because a committee announces a competing spec. Before this announcement, MCP had already reached 10,000 servers and tens of millions of monthly SDK downloads, per The Next Web.

Enterprise infrastructure decisions tend to track vendor relationships as much as protocol specs. A company deep in Microsoft Azure and Salesforce has an obvious gravitational pull toward a standard those vendors endorse. That dynamic, not the technical details of the protocol, will likely determine which standard wins in large-scale enterprise deployments.

What to watch next

The next concrete milestone is a public spec or GitHub repository from the coalition. Once the standard has a public name and defined semantics, enterprises can evaluate it alongside MCP on its technical merits. Until then the announcement is a market position, not a shippable product.

For operators building agent infrastructure now, the choice has real architectural stakes: commit to MCP's existing tooling and ecosystem, wait for the coalition spec to land, or build with abstraction layers that could span both. Those decisions carry consequences that will take 12 to 24 months to fully surface.

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