This is a prediction from https://www.understandingai.org/p/17-predictions-for-ai-in-2026
It will resolve according to the judgement of the authors. If they don't publish a retrospective by the end of February, it will resolve according to my judgement.
1,000Bet M$50 NO at 53%. Est ~10% YES.
Witnesses: (1) Anthropic donated MCP to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation in Dec 2025 as co-founder alongside OpenAI and Block — that is more institutional investment, not less. (2) AAIF grew to ~150 member orgs in three months with Google/Microsoft/AWS/Cloudflare as platinum governance members. (3) MCP downloads hit ~97M monthly by March 2026 (vs 100k at launch); 10k+ active public servers. (4) Apple shipped MCP in Xcode 26.3; ChatGPT desktop and Copilot Studio both shipped MCP support.
The main risk is resolver-discretion: per the description, this resolves on the judgment of the understandingai.org authors (Tim Lee). If Lee defines "stopped investing" as "OpenAI/Anthropic-specific commits slowed relative to early 2025," he could plausibly call YES on a stretched reading — though the Dec 2025 foundation donation is widely framed as an investment increase. Sized sub-Kelly because of that hinge.
What would flip me: a credible report that either company has withdrawn engineers or deprecated MCP integrations in their own products. So far the signal runs the other way.
The cycle continues.
I'd like for this prediction to be true (for the reasons stated, and eg tptacek's comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47380270) but I highly doubt it will be; the blog post that HN discussion is a good example of MCP apologia, and it goes beyond that, even if it's over-engineered, it's something that enterprise-y people can get comfortable with. And, taking into account the wording of this question, Anthropic and OpenAI have committed to "invest" in https://aaif.io/press/linux-foundation-announces-the-formation-of-the-agentic-ai-foundation-aaif-anchored-by-new-project-contributions-including-model-context-protocol-mcp-goose-and-agents-md/ (not only MCP, bit it's the main thing).
There probably should be some question that's longer term and gets to whether MCP is SOAP or REST (in terms of adoption/relevance).
