Yea it certainly does benefit Claude Desktop to some degree, but most MCP servers are a few hundred SLOC and the protocol schema itself is only ~400 SLOC. If that was the only major obstacle standing in the way of adoption, I'd be very surprised.
Coupled with the fact that any LLM trained for tool use can utilize the protocol, it doesn't feel like much of a moat that uniquely positions Claude Desktop in a meaningful way.
MCP is useful because anthropic has a disproportionate share of API traffic relative to its valuation and a tiny share of first-party client traffic. The best way around this is to shift as much traffic to API as possible.
Coupled with the fact that any LLM trained for tool use can utilize the protocol, it doesn't feel like much of a moat that uniquely positions Claude Desktop in a meaningful way.