The Cloudflare + Anthropic partnership isn't good for MCP

Cloudflare is pushing for their own hosting services, setting the wrong industry standard

Last Thursday May 5th, 2024, Anthropic and Claude launched their partnership with top enterprise companies to introduce a set of official remote MCPs and had a demo day. These partnering companies include Asana, Atlassian, Block, Intercom, Linear, PayPal, Sentry, Stripe, and Webflow. These partnering companies used Cloudflare’s tooling to build their official MCP servers and hosted them on Cloudflare.

We think this is great for MCP adoption in the industry, but we believe Cloudflare is trapping enterprises into their hosting ecosystem.

How the partnership works

These partnering companies have now released their official MCP servers using Cloudflare “MCPAgent”. These MCP servers are remote hosted and using SSE on Cloudflare. You can see the official announcement and list of official MCP servers in this article.

Connecting to these servers is really easy. The official MCP will give you an SSE url and all you have to do is copy + paste that into your Claude config

Sentry’s MCP server for example:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "Sentry": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["mcp-remote", "https://mcp.sentry.dev/sse"]
    }
  }
}

Once you open your Claude Desktop, it’ll prompt you to log in. After log in, you’re set to go.

We think it’s great for MCP adoption

This partnership is very significant. We have the largest AI client supporting MCPs (Anthropic) partnering with the largest cloud computing provider supporting remote MCPs (Cloudflare), with other major enterprise companies on board.

Until this announcement, we haven’t seen any enterprise adoption of MCPs. Most MCP servers out there were unofficial, open source projects. Most MCP servers are not remote hosted and lack a proper way to OAuth.

This partnership is a good signal that enterprise companies are willing to adopt MCPs and support it. We also think this is signal that these companies care a lot about OAuth as Cloudflare tooling has shown they can properly handle authentication upon opening up the client.

Why it’s a trap for enterprises

At MCPJam, we strongly believe these enterprise companies are being trapped by Cloudflare and are going down the wrong direction.

1. SSE is deprecating, yet Cloudflare is pushing for it. Anthropic announced that MCP was now supporting streamable HTTP and moving away from SSE (see this article). This contradicts their partnership with Cloudflare that’s pushing for hosting SSE. Why would Anthropic promote outdated methods to their customers?

2. This is a Cloudflare trap. We think Cloudflare is trying to pull a Vercel-Next.js relationship where they want to own the MCP template and provide one click deploy to sell their hosting compute credits. They know that most enterprise infrastructure isn’t equipped to host SSE.

Once enterprises find out they can host streamable HTTP servers like any other express app, they’ll move away from Cloudflare hosting. We think enterprises should be able to host their own MCPs on their own infrastructure using streamable HTTP.