Candid

Name: Candid MCP Server
Availability: InStock
Author: Candid

HIPAA CompliantSOC2 ReadyISO 27001 Ready

Data & Research6 tools

Search Candid's database of 1.9 million US nonprofits and foundations from your AI assistant, look up grantmakers by mission and location, and read the sector's research library. Free with a Candid account, read-only, and shipped with an explicit clock so a model never guesses what year it is.

Verified connector

Listed by Anthropic as a partner connector in its Connectors Directory.

Connection checked by Agentman on 19 August 2026.

Anthropic states this reflects the level of review a connector received, not a security audit.

Connect Candid via MCP

https://mcp.candid.org/mcp

Works in any MCP-compatible client. In Agentman Studio it is one click — no config file to edit.

Use in Agentman

Connect Candid once and your agents call these tools on their own — on a schedule, in a workflow, with nobody at the keyboard.

Open in Agentman Studio

Candid Tools & Capabilities (6)

knowledge_resources

identify_mentioned_organizations

search_organizations

taxonomy_terms

identify_locations

current_date

Tool names from Anthropic's directory listing. This server requires sign-in, so we could not read tool descriptions or parameter schemas.

Limits

Financial data can be years out of date, and Candid says so. Candid states the IRS is significantly delayed in processing nonprofit filings and that documents available may not be the most recent an organisation has filed. Candid has described a 1.5–2-year lag pre-pandemic and at one point a three-year-or-more lag.
Currency varies by tool within a single answer. News and the knowledge base are described as updated continuously or daily; organisation financials move at the IRS release schedule.
The connector is in beta, in both Candid's and Anthropic's words. Candid states you may encounter bugs, errors or unexpected results, and adds that LLMs can make mistakes and that you should always double-check Claude's output. That is Candid's statement, carried unsoftened.
No calculations or aggregations. Candid states the connector does not currently directly support questions involving calculations, aggregations or analysis, and gives ranking largest grants and computing multi-year percentage change as examples it does not serve.
Advanced data is paywalled. Candid states that complete grant history and other advanced features require a paid Candid subscription, while basic profiles, search and the knowledge base are free.
A free Candid account is required, per Candid's own documentation — despite Anthropic's article stating that basic search requires no separate Candid account. The two documents disagree and we report the data provider's version.
Coverage is US-centric. Candid states its most comprehensive coverage is of US organisations, particularly IRS-registered 501(c)(3)s and US grantmaking foundations.
Entity resolution can match the wrong organisation. US nonprofits share names, change them and use DBAs; the EIN is the stable key. A wrong match is checkable via the profile link, but the check is manual and no confidence score or ambiguity flag is documented.
knowledge_resources returns authored material, not database records. Research reports, blog posts and news carry a viewpoint and a publication date, and nothing documented labels which tool a given claim came from.
A transparency seal is not a quality rating. It measures how much an organisation has published about itself.
No tool annotations could be read. The endpoint returned HTTP 401 to an anonymous handshake on 2026-08-19. Every tool on this page is labelled "not annotated" rather than assumed read-only.
The permissions label is absent from the directory record. Anthropic's connector page labels the connector read-only, which we report as likely rather than confirmed.
Prompts are unconfirmed. Anthropic's snapshot lists no prompt names, and the gated endpoint blocked our own check.
The directory's documentation link points at Anthropic's article, not Candid's. Candid's own guide is more detailed on the tool set, the free/paid split and the aggregation limitation.
The claudeai scope is undocumented. Neither the RFC 9728 descriptor nor the RFC 8414 metadata says what it grants.
No published accuracy or match rate. Neither party publishes false-match rates for the entity resolvers or completeness figures for the corpus beyond the 1.9M+ organisation count.

Frequently asked questions

The connector itself is free, and Candid states it is available to all registered Candid users including those on its free tier. You need a free Candid account to register. Candid's own documentation adds that basic organization profiles, search and the knowledge base are included free, while complete grant history and other advanced features require a paid Candid subscription.

Because a language model has no reliable sense of today's date and nonprofit data is intensely time-relative. Candid describes it as a background technical tool that identifies the current date for time-sensitive queries. Without it a model resolves a phrase such as last year against its training cutoff rather than the actual calendar, which silently skews any question about recent filings or grants.

It can be years old, and Candid says so plainly. Candid states the IRS is significantly delayed in processing nonprofit filings, and that documents available may not be the most recent an organization has filed. Candid has described receiving comprehensive IRS 990 data roughly 1.5 to 2 years after a calendar year ends, having at one point faced a three-year-or-more lag.

No. Anthropic's connector page labels Candid read-only, and all six tool names in the 2026-08-16 directory snapshot are read-shaped: search, lookup, taxonomy and date tools. Candid is a data publisher rather than a system of record you operate, so there is no account state for the connector to alter. We could not confirm this from tool annotations because the endpoint is gated.

Candid-authored editorial and reference material, not structured organization records. Candid describes its knowledge search as covering its expert library of research reports, training materials, blog posts, news and academic research. That distinction matters when reading output: search_organizations returns database facts about a nonprofit, while knowledge_resources returns articles and guidance that carry a point of view.

Coverage is strongest for the United States. Candid states its most comprehensive coverage is of US organizations, particularly IRS-registered 501(c)(3) organizations and US grantmaking foundations. Non-US organizations appear but should not be assumed to be represented at the same depth. Candid's guidance for a missing organization is to search by EIN, alternate names or acronyms, or to broaden the terms.

No, and Candid states this directly. Candid documents that the connector is designed for searching specific organizations or general sector knowledge, and does not currently directly support questions involving calculations, aggregations or analysis. Its own examples of unsupported queries are ranking the largest grants in a year and computing percentage change in funding across several years.

Sources

Candid getting-started guide for the MCP connector — https://learning.candid.org/getting-started-with-the-candid-mcp-connector/375441 (fetched 2026-08-19; the vendor's own documentation, and the source for the four named capabilities plus the unnamed background tools, the geographic-coding and current-date descriptions, the free-account requirement, the free-versus-paid split, the beta warning, the double-check warning, and the calculations and aggregations limitation) · retrieved 2026-08-19
Anthropic support article, "Using the Candid connector in Claude" — https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12923235-using-the-candid-connector-in-claude (fetched 2026-08-19; the documentation URL carried in the directory record, and the source for 1.9M+ organisations, the four seal tiers, the beta note, the statement that basic search requires no separate Candid account, the data-currency FAQ, the US coverage statement, the EIN search guidance, and the privacy statements) · retrieved 2026-08-19
Anthropic connector page for Candid — https://claude.com/connectors/candid (fetched 2026-08-19; the read-only permissions label, the nonprofit category, the free Candid account requirement, and its documentation link pointing at Candid's own guide rather than Anthropic's article) · retrieved 2026-08-19
Candid blog, "Access nonprofit data with the Candid MCP connector" — https://candid.org/blogs/claude-for-nonprofits-candid-mcp-connector-access-nonprofit-data-ai-assistant/ (fetched 2026-08-19; 1.9 million organisations, availability to all registered Candid users including the free tier) · retrieved 2026-08-19
Candid press release on the Anthropic partnership — https://candid.org/press/candid-partners-with-anthropic-to-bring-trusted-data-to-claude-for-nonprofits/ (fetched 2026-08-19; the 2 December 2025 announcement date, the Claude for Nonprofits context, and the free Candid account registration requirement) · retrieved 2026-08-19
Candid on Forms 990 on nonprofit profiles — https://learning.candid.org/form-990s-on-nonprofit-profiles/381563 (fetched 2026-08-19; Candid's statements that the IRS is significantly delayed in processing filings, that documents available may not be the most recent an organisation has filed, and that data updates only when Candid receives the updated form from the IRS) · retrieved 2026-08-19
Candid blog on new Form 990 releases — https://candid.org/blogs/new-990s-are-here-why-thats-a-big-deal-what-happens-now (fetched 2026-08-19; post dated 12 June 2023; the 1.5–2-year pre-pandemic timeline and the three-year-or-more lag) · retrieved 2026-08-19
Live anonymous probe — 2026-08-19: initialize to https://mcp.candid.org/mcp returns HTTP 401 with www-authenticate: Bearer error="invalid_token" and a resource_metadata pointer at the path-append descriptor. No tool listing or annotations were obtainable · retrieved 2026-08-19
Live RFC 9728 protected-resource descriptors — https://mcp.candid.org/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource/mcp (fetched 2026-08-19, HTTP 200, 190 bytes; four scopes including claudeai) and https://mcp.candid.org/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource (HTTP 200, 183 bytes; three scopes, different resource identifier). The path-prefix form returns 404 · retrieved 2026-08-19
Live RFC 8414 authorization-server metadata — https://mcp.candid.org/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server (fetched 2026-08-19, HTTP 200, 467 bytes; issuer, dynamic client registration, PKCE S256, authorization code and refresh token grants, and the same four scopes) · retrieved 2026-08-19
Doc discovery — candid.org/robots.txt returns 200 and disallows nothing, pointing at a sitemap; candid.org/llms.txt returns 200 but is Yoast-generated SEO output listing pages, posts and glossary entries with no mention of the connector; mcp.candid.org/robots.txt returns 404 and the bare MCP host returns 404. No host returned a Content-Signal header (all fetched 2026-08-19) · retrieved 2026-08-19
Anthropic connector directory — https://claude.ai/directory/875faf93-08c4-469c-980f-6f79f70f10d3 (snapshot 2026-08-16; six tool names, no prompt names, no permissions field, nonprofit category, partner tier). The page returned HTTP 403 to our own fetch on 2026-08-19, so the record is reported from the snapshot · retrieved 2026-08-16