# MCP Ecosystem Statistics 2026

> The Model Context Protocol by the numbers — SDK downloads, server counts across registries, governance facts, and growth since the Linux Foundation donation.

MCP's growth since the December 2025 Linux Foundation donation, measured against live registries: SDK downloads roughly 4x'd in six months (npm SDK 38.5M→153M monthly; PyPI's mcp adds 268M), registries list 6,000–22,000 servers depending on curation bar, and the AAIF has grown to ~146 members (from 41 at the December 2025 launch). Every count dated and sourced.

MCP went from Anthropic side-project (November 2024) to Linux Foundation standard (December 2025) to — by mid-2026 — infrastructure whose download counts resemble a major package ecosystem. The numbers below are **pulled live from registries and primary announcements, dated June 12, 2026**, and refreshed on a cadence; circulating figures we couldn't trace are omitted.

## The baseline: donation day (December 9, 2025)

From the [Anthropic and Linux Foundation announcements](/glossary/model-context-protocol) *(primary)*:

- **97M+ monthly SDK downloads** across the official SDKs
- **~10,000 active/published MCP servers**
- First-class client support named at donation: ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, VS Code
- The **Agentic AI Foundation** launched with founding projects MCP, goose (Block), and AGENTS.md (OpenAI — itself in 60,000+ open-source projects), and founding members AWS, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI

## Six months later: the growth curve

Measured directly from registry APIs, **June 12, 2026** *(primary)*:

| Metric | Dec 2025 | Jun 2026 | Source |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| npm `@modelcontextprotocol/sdk`, monthly downloads | 38.5M | **~153M** | npm registry API |
| PyPI `mcp` package, monthly downloads | — | **~268M** | pypistats |
| PyPI `fastmcp`, monthly downloads | — | ~74M | pypistats |
| Combined core SDKs | ~97M (all SDKs, official figure) | **~420M** (npm+PyPI core alone) | computed |

Roughly a **4x rise in six months** on the cleanest comparable series — and since the June figure counts only the two core packages, it understates the total.

## How many servers? Name the registry

| Registry | Servers (Jun 12, 2026) | Bar |
| --- | --- | --- |
| [Smithery](/tools/smithery) | **6,222** | Curated registry (API `totalCount`) |
| PulseMCP | **18,233** | Broad daily-updated tracker |
| mcp.so | **~22,182** | Self-reported directory count |

The spread is the lesson: "how many MCP servers exist" has no single answer — curation bars differ by 3.5x — so any citation should name its registry. (The official registry exposes no public total; we don't quote one.) What the spread agrees on: supply outgrew discovery, which is why [the shortlist](/guides/mcp/best-mcp-servers-2026) matters more than the catalog and [governance](/guides/mcp/govern-mcp-servers) became its own discipline.

## Ecosystem signals

- **modelcontextprotocol/servers**: ~87,100 GitHub stars; the Python SDK ~23,300, TypeScript SDK ~12,700, spec repo ~8,400 *(GitHub API, primary)*.
- **AAIF membership** beyond the founding eight: **18 Gold members at launch** (including Cisco, Datadog, Docker, IBM, JetBrains, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, Shopify, Snowflake) and **23 Silver** (including Hugging Face, Uber, Zapier, Pydantic, Elastic), since expanded to **146 total members** by February 2026 *(Linux Foundation, primary)*.
- The protocol's sibling under the same roof: [A2A](/guides/mcp/mcp-vs-a2a) for agent-to-agent, donated by Google in mid-2025 — both halves of the agent stack now sit in neutral governance.

The arc these numbers trace: MCP won the agent-to-tool layer the way standards win — not by mandate but by **default-ness**, until "does it speak MCP" stopped being a question. The practical guides for living in that ecosystem: [adding servers to Claude Code](/guides/mcp/claude-code-mcp-setup) and [the 2026 server shortlist](/guides/mcp/best-mcp-servers-2026).

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_Source: https://agentscamp.com/guides/mcp/mcp-ecosystem-statistics — Guide on AgentsCamp._