David Soria Parra is a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic and the co-creator of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard that has rapidly become the industry’s common language for connecting AI assistants to tools, data, and services. Since its launch, MCP has been adopted by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, OpenAI, and thousands of developers worldwide, and is now governed through the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. Before joining Anthropic, David spent nearly a decade at Meta leading engineering organizations across developer infrastructure and source control, and served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Sutter Hill Ventures. A long-time open source contributor, he has been a core developer on PHP and a significant contributor to Mercurial — experience that directly shapes his approach to building open, durable protocols for the AI era.

Caitie McCaffrey is a Software Engineer at Microsoft building agentic platforms and developer tools. She’s a Core Maintainer on MCP. Caitie has spent her career building large-scale distributed systems and services across multiple domains, including gaming, social media, and IoT.

Brad is the Tech Lead for AI at Block, where he builds both internal- and external-facing AI agents. He built and maintains goose, the open-source AI agent framework in the AAIF. Brad previously earned his physics PhD from UC Berkeley and worked on processing and analyzing data at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva.

Nick Cooper is a senior member of technical staff at OpenAI working with a particular focus on scalable patterns to make life easy while iterating quickly. He is the technical lead at OpenAI for protocols, MCP Core maintainer and AAIF governing board member. He comes from a brief stint in start-ups after a lifetime in big tech. If forced to share a personal hobby he’ll tell you it’s woodworking but really it’s cooking.

Alan Blount (he/him) is a Sr. Product Manager for the Agent Platform at Google Cloud Vertex AI. A software engineer for 20 years turned PM, he empowers developers to build trustworthy, state-of-the-art Gen AI agents. His focus spans the alphabet soup of agentic tech: ADK, A2A, MCP, A2UI, and UCP. Previously in Payments, Alan leveraged ML for Smart Router to optimize auth rates and dispute mitigation. He is dedicated to moving beyond buzzwords to ship capable, production-grade agent systems. Before Google, Alan was a Tech Lead / Full Stack Developer helping build startups into successful small companies, since ~2001. Alan also mentored at free coding bootcamps, universities, and has spoken at conferences and meetups.

Sambhav Kothari leads foundational GenAI and agentic platform engineering at Bloomberg, focusing on secure model orchestration, high-trust agent runtimes, and enterprise GenAI developer tooling. He is a maintainer of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and contributes to ecosystem standards around interoperability and safety. Sambhav is an active open-source contributor across popular CNCF and Python projects.

James Ward is an author, podcaster, conference speaker, blogger, open source contributor, and long-time developer who loves teaching developers how to build better software.