Technology Radar
MCP Apps is the first official extension to the Model Context Protocol, letting MCP servers return interactive HTML interfaces as dashboards, forms and visualizations that render directly in the conversation. Co-developed by Anthropic, OpenAI and open-source contributors, the extension standardizes a ui:// resource scheme where tools declare UI templates rendered in sandboxed iframes with graceful degradation to text when the host lacks UI support. Unlike AG-UI, which operates as a separate library layer, MCP Apps packages UI directly inside MCP servers. The bidirectional design lets models observe user actions while the interface handles live data and direct manipulation that text cannot. Clients including Claude, ChatGPT, VS Code and Goose already ship support. Teams exploring richer agent interactions should assess whether the added complexity over plain text responses is warranted for their use case.
