{"id":4045,"date":"2025-11-03T08:57:52","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T13:57:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/matlab\/?p=4045"},"modified":"2025-11-03T08:59:17","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T13:59:17","slug":"exploring-the-matlab-model-context-protocol-mcp-core-server-with-claude-desktop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/matlab\/2025\/11\/03\/exploring-the-matlab-model-context-protocol-mcp-core-server-with-claude-desktop\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring the MATLAB Model Context Protocol (MCP) Core Server with Claude Desktop"},"content":{"rendered":"
Over at the Artificial Intelligence blog<\/span><\/a> my colleagues, Yann Debray and Akshay Paul, have announced the release of the <\/span>MATLAB MCP Core Server<\/span><\/a>, MathWorks' first MCP Server.<\/span><\/div>
Introduced<\/span> last November by Anthropic<\/span><\/a>, MCP is an open standard for AI applications to connect to external tools and data. Some people refer to it as the 'USB-C for AI' because it is a standard way of connecting AI models to other things. There has been a lot of hype around it, some of which may be justified; and even more articles and tutorials that go into great depth about how everything works. For us, however, the core principle is very simple...<\/span><\/div>

MATLAB MCP Core Server allows AI models to use MATLAB<\/span><\/h2>
In one sense, MCP doesn't provide us with anything fundamentally new. Early last month, for example, I showed <\/span>how to configure Ollama to call tools defined in MATLAB<\/span><\/a>. I could have done similar articles for ChatGPT and a range of other AI systems but I would have needed to tweak the code a little in each case. With MCP, I would only need to show you how to define a tool once.<\/span><\/div>
Last Friday, we released <\/span>one<\/span> MCP server for MATLAB but, as you saw from Yann's blogpost, it already works with many MCP Clients such as VSCode, Claude Desktop or Gemini CLI. Indeed, it should work with <\/span>any<\/span> MCP client with a little configuration.<\/span><\/div>
The practical upshot of this is that now, you can plug MATLAB into any AI system using MATLAB MCP Core Server. So...I started by plugging it into <\/span>Claude Desktop<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/div>

Baby steps with Claude Desktop and the first hallucination of the day<\/span><\/h2>
Installation details are in the <\/span>project's README.md<\/span><\/a>. If everything has gone well, when you launch Claude Desktop it will also launch a copy of MATLAB. You will also be able to see the available tools via the <\/span>Search and Tools<\/span> button on Claude Desktop<\/span><\/div>
\"\"<\/img><\/div>
As you can see, the server provides 5 tools to the AI. These are <\/span><\/div>