MCP Apps: Extending the Frontier — Ido Salomon & Liad Yosef
Aug 2, 2026 · 18:38
Ido Salomon and Liad Yosef, creators of MCP UI and co-creators of the MCP Apps spec, explain how MCP Apps lets servers ship interactive branded UI instead of text into any supporting host. The official MCP extension, built with Anthropic and OpenAI and supported by Claude, VS Code, ChatGPT, Copilot, Cursor and Slack, links a tool call to a resource; the host renders returned HTML as a sandboxed web component and clicks flow back through a callback to the model. Early adopters include 11 Labs, Shopify and Postman; the payoff is distribution: with ChatGPT at 800 million weekly users, you write once and run everywhere. The spec is still evolving, with an open working group meeting every three weeks and live work on reusable views, AppTools/ViewTools for host-to-app control, and interoperability with generative UI standards like A2UI.
