The week Anthropic handed the Model Context Protocol to the Linux Foundation, San Francisco lined up around the block. A mini-documentary and seven speaker interviews, produced by Free Agent Media for WorkOS.
Model Context Protocol went from a two-person project inside Anthropic to a de facto standard in about a year. Then, on December 9, 2025, Anthropic donated it. MCP became a founding project of the Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation co-founded with Block and OpenAI and backed by Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg. The protocol that had been one company's open-source project now had a neutral home, alongside Block's goose and OpenAI's AGENTS.md.
The next evening, WorkOS held MCP Night: The Holiday Special at the Regency Ballroom. Nearly 2,000 people came. The line wrapped the block, passers-by stopped to ask what was going on, and the people on stage were the ones the news was about: MCP's creator David Soria Parra, OpenAI's MCP lead Nick Cooper, Block's Manik Surtani, and the Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin, whose organization had just become the protocol's home.
The film opens on Market Street and a sit-down with Michael Grinich, looks back at the first MCP Night in May 2025, then moves into the Regency Ballroom as WorkOS creative director Kristopher Hughes and a crew of more than a hundred build the room. From there it goes to David Soria Parra, interviewed at the venue and still visibly surprised that anyone lined up for a protocol, through a one-year timeline of MCP, the panel, and live demos from Cloudflare and Datadog. It closes with Zemlin framing the new foundation the way the W3C once framed the web: a neutral place where tens of thousands of companies and individuals improve a standard every day, and the reason MCP can go the way Kubernetes went in cloud.
The point of the piece is not the protocol. It's the people willing to be seen believing in it, on camera, the week the news broke. That's what a customer can't get from a press release, and it's why WorkOS wanted the night captured as a story rather than a recap. The mini-documentary is one of eight pieces Free Agent Media cut from the night; the seven speaker interviews below each stand on their own.
“It's pretty uncommon that a new protocol comes out in the technology world. But what's even more uncommon is when you see people lined down the block for an event after work.”
“It could be eleven at night, 11:30 at night. A new slide comes into play and it's really easy to make this one decision that is going to maybe save you an hour. I've never seen someone on our team ever just say this is good enough.”
“When you create a project like MCP as a team of two within a company for a specific purpose, you don't expect it to be a de facto standard a year later. Nobody starts out trying to create a standard.”
“Think of this as the new W3C. In the days of the internet, we needed a neutral home for the HTTP standards. The Linux Foundation and the Agentic AI Foundation are going to be the home for that in the world of AI.”
“It's rare to get this many people to agree on anything, much less a new protocol.”
Conference & event coverage · Partner & customer stories
Three days of capture around one night. The story wasn't scripted in advance. We found it by being in the room early and staying late.
Everything cut from the project, each published by WorkOS as its own video. Click through to watch on their channel.
05:50The night from the sidewalk in: the line, the build, the creators, and the Linux Foundation framing the new home for MCP.
09:52The August 2024 frustration that started MCP, the Anthropic hackathon that proved it, and why a protocol can only exist in the open.
“Hopefully in a year from now, people will just be able to connect their workflow to what they need and they don't know it's MCP.” 08:40 ↗
09:33The three phases of AI, the Kubernetes precedent, and why MCP needed a neutral home before the market could form around it.
“The '90s called and they want their proprietary software back.” 06:50 ↗
06:45How goose led Block to MCP, and the handshake with David Soria Parra that became the Agentic AI Foundation.
“We shook hands and decided it's much better to do it together rather than do it alone.” 02:35 ↗
08:02A year of remote MCP servers on Cloudflare, and Code Mode: letting models write code instead of forcing them to call tools.
“Asking an LLM to do tool calling is like asking Shakespeare to take a month-long crash course in Mandarin and then write a play in it.” 04:35 ↗
04:38Giving agents SQL against web-scale logs, metrics, and traces through the Datadog MCP server, and what they did with it.
“They've been trained on so much SQL that they are better at it than most humans.” 02:00 ↗
05:09The Chrome DevTools MCP server, agentic debugging flows, and why evals are the test coverage of MCP tools.
“There's a lot of opportunity for red teaming, like a senior annoyed developer that's like, are you sure you want to do that?” 02:14 ↗
04:23The Turbo-Man Tracker: a Supabase MCP demo built on the plot of Jingle All the Way, and why its author barely writes SQL anymore.
“I spent more time working on the slides than I did writing the software.” 01:56 ↗
Free Agent Media, a video production company for technology companies based in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York, produced all eight pieces for WorkOS. WorkOS published them on its YouTube channel in May 2026.
WorkOS MCP Night: The Holiday Special, held at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco on December 10, 2025, with 1,978 registered attendees. It was the third MCP Night that WorkOS hosted in 2025.
On December 9, 2025, Anthropic donated the Model Context Protocol to the Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI. MCP Night was the community's first gathering after the news, with MCP co-creator David Soria Parra, Block's Manik Surtani, and Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin on stage and on camera.
A six-minute mini-documentary and seven speaker interviews: David Soria Parra (Anthropic), Jim Zemlin (The Linux Foundation), Manik Surtani (Block), Rita Kozlov (Cloudflare), Reilly Wood (Datadog), Paul Irish (Google Chrome DevTools), and Craig Cannon (Supabase).
Michael Grinich and Kristopher Hughes of WorkOS, David Soria Parra of Anthropic, Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation, Nick Cooper of OpenAI, Manik Surtani of Block, Rita Kozlov of Cloudflare, Reilly Wood of Datadog, Craig Cannon of Supabase, Paul Irish of Google, Den Delimarsky of Microsoft, and Garrett Galow of WorkOS.
Free Agent Media shot over three days: the WorkOS office the evening before, the Regency Ballroom from 6am load-in through the panel, demos, speaker interviews, and afterparty, and a sit-down with Michael Grinich at the WorkOS office the following morning.
