Compete in OpenAI’s WebMCP Challenge with Netlify

Netlify is partnering with OpenAI to support the WebMCP Challenge, offering 3 million credits and a $5,000 prize pool for builders who create agent-native web apps or add WebMCP support to existing ones. WebMCP is an experimental open web standard under the W3C's Web Machine Learning Community Group that adds navigator.modelContext to browsers, enabling AI agents to call structured tools directly. The challenge opens Aug 25, 2026 at 11 a.m. PT, with a kickoff livestream at 3 p.m. PT.

The WebMCP Challenge opens today. Netlify is partnering with OpenAI to support WebMCP and backing builders with 3 million credits and a $5,000 prize pool. To win, build a new agent-native web app, or add WebMCP support to one you already run. . Join the challenge For a lot of people, the web started as a directory, a hand-curated list of links on a site like Yahoo. Then came Google and search. That worked because the web was already open and able to be read. Crawlers could follow links and index pages without asking permission, with a handful of light conventions like sitemaps to guide them. WebMCP https://webmcp.dev/ could be the next version of that, but reading isn’t the same problem as acting. A crawler indexing a page is one thing; an agent booking a table or completing a checkout is another. It needs to know exactly what’s safe to do and when to check back with you first. A casual operating agreement isn’t enough for that. That’s where WebMCP comes in. What is WebMCP? WebMCP is an experimental open web standard currently a draft https://webmachinelearning.github.io/webmcp/ under the W3C’s Web Machine Learning Community Group that adds navigator.modelContext to the browser, letting a site expose structured tools an AI agent can call directly instead of clicking and typing through a normal interface. Instead of describing what you want to a search box, you’d describe it to an agent, and the agent would act on it directly, booking the table, checking the order, filling the form, using tools the site has explicitly defined instead of guessing its way through an interface built for a person with a mouse. Making the agents navigation a ton more efficient. How to add WebMCP to your site ChatGPT’s in-app browser supports WebMCP out of the box today, with permissioning and safety checks built in – the agent has to have access to a site before it can use its tools, and sensitive actions like purchases or messages still require confirmation. You can also test WebMCP in Chrome paste chrome://flags/ enable-webmcp-testing in your browser and enable it. In practice, adding WebMCP to a site is a small amount of code that lets you register a tool with a name, a description, and a schema, and tells the agent to use a function your site already has. It looks like this: For the full API, security model, and schema details, see the WebMCP spec https://webmachinelearning.github.io/webmcp/ . What can help you for the challenge We wanted builders to have working code to start from fast, so we published five demo apps https://webmcpchallenge.netlify.app/ you can read and prompt or fork: : a prompt-first starting point. Copy the prompt, hand it to your agent, and it builds and deploys the site on Netlify using Agent Runners. WebMCP starter https://webmcp-starter.netlify.app/ : a fictional marketplace where an agent can search products, add items to a cart, and complete a simulated checkout. Its Kurio https://webmcp-kurio.netlify.app/ /learn page shows exactly what the agent sees.: a public guestbook where agents can read and post notes, with every write moderated through Netlify’s AI Gateway. Tagboard https://webmcp-tagboard.netlify.app/ : a fictional restaurant where agents work against live reservation state. They can hit a fully booked slot, negotiate alternatives, place holds, confirm or cancel bookings. Mabel’s Table https://webmcp-mabels-table.netlify.app/ : a detective mystery built for a person and their agent to solve together, where some clues are visual and others are only reachable through tools. The Archive https://webmcp-archive.netlify.app/ Each one is live, forkable, and meant to show a different pattern for putting WebMCP to work. Start building with us As an open standard, WebMCP is a positive step toward that future and why we’re excited to support OpenAI’s WebMCP Challenge. Aug 25, 2026 11 a.m. PT : the challenge opens. Aug 25, 2026 3 p.m. PT : kickoff livestream with example apps and implementation ideas. Aug 31, 2026 11 a.m. PT : community office hours with our team. Sep 3, 2026 5 p.m. PT : submissions close. Sep 23, 2026 : winners announced. Full rules, the judging rubric, and everything else you need to enter: We think the agent-native web should be built in the open, by a lot of people at once. Come build something, and come talk about it with us on Discord https://discord.gg/netlify .