MCP as a spec is really promising; a universal way to connect LLMs to tools. But in practice you hit a lot of edge cases really quickly. To name a few; auth, streaming of tool responses, custom instructions per tool, verifying tool authenticity (is the server I'm using trustworthy?). It's still not entirely clear (*for remote servers*) to me what you can do with MCP that you can't do with just a REST API, the latter being a much more straightforward integration path.
If other vendors do adopt MCP (OpenAI and Gemini have promised to) the problem they're going to run into very quickly is that they want to do things (provide UI elements, interaction layers) that go beyond the MCP spec. And a huge amount of MCP server integrations will just be lackluster at best; perhaps I'm wrong -- but if I'm { OpenAI, Anthropic, Google } I don't want a consumer installing Bob's Homegrown Stripe Integration from a link they found on 10 Best MCP Integrations, sharing their secret key, and getting (A) a broken experience that doesn't match the brand or worse yet, (B) credentials stolen.
https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol...
MCP as a spec is really promising; a universal way to connect LLMs to tools. But in practice you hit a lot of edge cases really quickly. To name a few; auth, streaming of tool responses, custom instructions per tool, verifying tool authenticity (is the server I'm using trustworthy?). It's still not entirely clear (*for remote servers*) to me what you can do with MCP that you can't do with just a REST API, the latter being a much more straightforward integration path.
If other vendors do adopt MCP (OpenAI and Gemini have promised to) the problem they're going to run into very quickly is that they want to do things (provide UI elements, interaction layers) that go beyond the MCP spec. And a huge amount of MCP server integrations will just be lackluster at best; perhaps I'm wrong -- but if I'm { OpenAI, Anthropic, Google } I don't want a consumer installing Bob's Homegrown Stripe Integration from a link they found on 10 Best MCP Integrations, sharing their secret key, and getting (A) a broken experience that doesn't match the brand or worse yet, (B) credentials stolen.