[LINK] Chinese tech giants race to expand AI services market with latest open-standard protocol MCP

[Stephen Loosley]

Chinese tech giants race to expand AI services market with latest open-standard protocol

China is seeing growing adoption of the model context protocol  (MCP)  which has become a de facto standard for AI integration


By Ben Jiangin Beijing Published: 8:30pm, 21 Apr 2025
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3307333/chinese-tech-giants-race-expand-ai-services-market-latest-open-standard-protocol


Major Chinese technology companies are racing to launch services based on the open model context protocol (MCP), which enables Manus-like artificial intelligence (AI) agents to connect with thi d-party online tools, data sources and systems – a trend that could expand the commercial adoption of such applications.

Alipay operator Ant Group – the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post – last week unveiled its “MCP server for payment services”. This lets AI agents seamlessly connect with Alipay’s payment platform.

That, in turn, enables Alipay users to “easily make payments, check payment statuses and initiate refunds using simple natural language commands”, according to the Ant Group statement.

With MCP, various applications can provide relevant information to large language models (LLMs) – the technology underpinning generative AI services such as ChatGPT – while ensuring that these models function effectively within a defined scope, the company said.

It added that MCP standardises how AI models interact with various data sources and tools, like a “USB-C port for AI applications”.

The adoption of MCP by some of China’s biggest tech firms shows how AI agents are turning into a new avenue for domestic innovation and vast commercial opportunities, compared with chatbots and LLMs.

[Photo caption: A demonstration video online shows artificial intelligence agent Manus executing various practical tasks, such as creating a custom website. Photo: Shutterstock]


American AI start-up Anthropic, which introduced MCP last November, said the standard connects AI agents – which serve as a layer on top of AI models – to the systems where data lives, “including content repositories, business tools and development environments”.

AI agents, such as Butterfly Effect’s Manus, are programs capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of a user or another system. These agents create a plan of specific tasks and subtasks to complete a goal using available resources.

To improve integration efficiency between AI agents and external tools, Ant Group said its AI agent development platform, dubbed Tbox, supports the deployment of more than 30 MCP services now in the market. These include those for Alipay and Amap Maps, as well as Google MCP and Amazon Web Services’ knowledge base retrieval server.

Earlier this month, Alibaba Cloud – the cloud computing services and AI arm of e-commerce giant Alibaba – launched an MCP marketplace via its AI model hosting platform ModelScope. The marketplace offers more than 1,000 services that include those that connect to online mapping tools, office collaboration platforms like Slack, online storage services, documents generated via Google search, and cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools under Google Workspace.

Chinese AI and online search firm Baidu, meanwhile, said its support for MCP is expected to foster “abundant use cases for [AI] applications and solutions”.

The growing domestic adoption of MCP, which has quickly become a de facto global standard for AI integration, also lends credence to the assessment of Butterfly Effect founder and chief executive Red Xiao Hong, who described an AI agent as “more like a human being”, compared with how chatbots perform, because it not only thinks and answers questions, but interacts with its environment, collects feedback and uses the feedback as a new prompt.



Ben Jiang
Ben is a Beijing-based technology reporter for the Post focusing on emerging start-ups. He has previously covered Chinese tech for publications including KrA