Five Big Improvements to Gradio MCP Servers

Gradio is an open-source Python package for creating AI-powered web applications. Gradio is compliant with the MCP server protocol and powers thousands of MCP servers hosted on Hugging Face Spaces . The Gradio team is betting big on Gradio and Spaces being the best way to build and host AI-powered MCP servers.

To that end, here are some of the big improvements we've added to Gradio MCP servers as of version 5.38.0 .

If you've tried to use a remote Gradio MCP server that takes a file as input (image, video, audio), you've probably encountered this error:

Gradio automatically generates tool descriptions from your function names and docstrings. Now you can customize the tool description even further with the api_description parameter. In this example, the tool description will read "Apply a sepia filter to any image."

While many ways exist to host files online, they all add a manual step to your workflow. In the age of LLM agents, shouldn't we expect them to handle this for you?

OpenAPI is a widely adopted standard for describing RESTful APIs in a machine-readable format, typically as a JSON file. Gradio now features the gr.load_openapi function, which creates a Gradio application directly from an OpenAPI schema. You can then launch the app with mcp_server=True to automatically create an MCP server for your API!

This happens because the Gradio server is hosted on a different machine, meaning any input files must be accessible via a public URL so they can be downloaded remotely.

Gradio now includes a "File Upload" MCP server that agents can use to upload files directly to your Gradio application. If any tools in your Gradio MCP server require file inputs, the connection documentation will now show you how to start the "File Upload" MCP server:

Learn more about using this server (and important security considerations) in the Gradio Guides .