Today, we are announcing that Symfony teamed up with The PHP Foundation, and
Anthropic’s MCP team to launch the official MCP SDK. Our goal is a
framework-agnostic, production-ready library the entire PHP ecosystem can rely on.
The Symfony team will lead maintenance, with contributions from the broader
community, including Kyrian Obikwelu (PHP-MCP).
Model Context Protocol
Less than a year ago, Anthropic released the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an
open protocol to standardize how LLM-powered client applications interact with
context-providing servers. The specification is designed around common
capabilities that are used when building agents and complex workflows, like
Prompts, Tools, Resources, and more.
The specification is designed around common capabilities, used when building
agents and complex workflow — such as Prompts, Tools, and Resources — and has
already seen broad adoption across the software industry. Published under the
MIT license, MCP first shipped with SDKs in Python and TypeScript, sparking
hundreds of open-source clients, servers, and SDKs in more languages.
Symfony joining forces for the official MCP SDK
When we kicked off the Symfony AI initiative, a low-level MCP SDK was already
part of it. It was rather a first draft – not yet feature complete – and meant
to evolve as part of the initiative. In parallel, the PHP-MCP project
maintained multiple MCP-related packages as well.
Now, thanks to an initiative led by The PHP Foundation in collaboration
with Anthropic’s MCP team, Symfony and PHP-MCP are joining forces to
provide the official PHP MCP SDK.
$ composer require mcp/sdkStill work in progress
The repository and package are now public, but we have not yet tagged a stable
release. As with the Symfony AI initiative, we’re inviting the community to
help shape the SDK together.
How to Get Started
- Explore the repo: github.com/modelcontextprotocol/php-sdk
- Check open issues and examples
- Try it out and share feedback
- Join Symfony AI Hackathon for hands-on collaboration
Closing Notes
We would like to thank David Soria Parra (Anthropic) and Roman Pronskiy (PHP Foundation) for their initiative, and Kyrian Obikwelu, of PHP-MCP, for heading into this endeavor with us.
As part of this transition, the current symfony/ai MCP SDK package will be deprecated and removed.
