I am a big fan of artificial intelligence taking on the miserable tasks of creative work. Renaming and tagging footage, syncing multiple camera angles, reformatting an ad for 50 different aspect ratios? Let the computer do that, thanks. Adobe showed me how its AI agent can do all that, right inside its apps, back in June. But actual creative work? Pass. Today, at its Max conference, Adobe is announcing something far more radical than anything it showed me just a few months ago. The company is previewing what it calls local MCP integrations with Creative Cloud tools. MCP is the Model Context Protocol, an open standard Anthropic created in late 2024 that acts as a universal adapter, letting any AI agent plug into any software tool. The integrations would let third-party agents like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini work directly inside your local Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and After Effects projects. On your machine. With access to your layers, vector paths, footage bins, and sequences. The projects stay editable by hand, and users will be able to, in Adobe’s words, “step in at any moment.” The apps themselves need to be installed and licensed on your computer, Adobe tells me, because the agent works locally in your project files with the full depth of the desktop tools. Adobe’s tools already work with third-party AIs—just the other way around. Since December 2025, ChatGPT users have been able to call on Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat to do design work right in OpenAI’s service. And back in April 2026, Adobe launched a connector for Claude to allow it to use more than 50 tools from Photoshop, Illustrator, or Premiere within the Anthropic AI’s cloud-based service. In September, the same ability came to Google. In all those cases, you drop a file—a PDF, an image, whatever—into a conversation with the AI, ask it to do things to it, and Adobe’s tools will take care of it. The integration allowed users to continue work later in Adobe’s apps. The new local MCP integration

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