Is something like Claude Desktop an MCP host or client?

[christianareas-postman]

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Discussion Topic

If I'm reading the docs correctly, Claude Desktop is an MCP host:

https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/learn/architecture#participants

But it's listed here as a client:

https://modelcontextprotocol.io/clients#claude-desktop-app

Should the page be called:

Example Hosts
A list of applications that support MCP integrations

[mozmo15]

Its technically both, depending on how you see "Claude desktop"
The link you put I think explains it well, its mostly the source for my own information

Technically, you dont really need any AI involved for MCP, its just a communication standard. But its one designed to "plug into" AI apps. Where it plugs into is the MCP host. The MCP host has to have an MCP client inside it to talk to the server.

Think of it this way, the "host" is what makes use of information that its client may fetch from an MCP server. For example, you talk to an LLM which is connected to an MCP server that fetches live weather data, and you ask it about the day's forecast. The host (LLM app) has an MCP client connected to this weather MCP server; it sees that it has access to a tool that can get you this information, so it tells it's MCP-client to make a tool call and processes the result. Then it runs its own logic to talk back to you. The host is the smart manager in this process, the MCP-client is just a utility it has access to that communicates with a specific server based on a messaging standard. The host can have many such MCP-clients at a time, for each server you may want to connect to