Hype isn’t free. Maybe the benefit is mutual, but I can’t tell how Anthropic gets paid.

Anthropic subsidizes an open standard, but proprietary extensions later emerge that lock you into servers from their marketplace or something? I need a sociopath to help me understand this.

The Anthropic models are running underneath everything (Claude Code, Windsurf, Cursor, etc). Whenever someone is using MCP they (in the generalized case, until now) ultimately end up using Anthropic as their LLM and Anthropic gets paid whenever someone does that.

This is literally not true. You can leverage MCP using any model. Even some of the IDEs you mention let you leverage MCP using many model providers.

There's already like a half dozen such "marketplaces" and they all ultimately point to open source repos. If the goal was to lock people in, they did a bad job of it.