DeepLearning.AIHands-on reviewedEditor's pick
MCP: Build Rich-Context AI Apps with Anthropic
Reviewed by AI Agent Rank editors · Last verified 2026-05-23
Our take
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the standard Anthropic introduced for connecting LLMs to external tools and data sources — and in 2026 it's becoming the lingua franca across Claude, Cursor, and most agent runtimes. This course is the canonical introduction, taught by Anthropic. Free, 90 minutes, hands-on building MCP servers and clients. The right course to take after the basic prompt engineering tutorials, before building production agents.
Pros
- +Authored by Anthropic — MCP is their protocol
- +Free, hands-on, fast
- +MCP is becoming standard — investment compounds across Claude, Cursor, agent frameworks
Cons
- −Newer course — feedback corpus is smaller than the older shorts
- −Pre-req: comfortable with Python + API calls
Best for
- · Developers building production AI agents in 2026
- · Anyone integrating LLMs with proprietary tools/data
Not ideal for
- · Beginners — assumes Python + LLM basics
- · Non-developers — MCP is fundamentally a developer-protocol
Ready to enroll?
Free on DeepLearning.AI · ~1.5 hours
After this course
These are the agents and tools where the skills from this course actually pay back.