Tagged: data
2026-10-21What 119,510 signed MCP server results show about uptime and tool-list driftWhat our probe saw across 5,916 public MCP endpoints in the month to 21 October 2026: how often they answered, how often their tool lists changed, and which protocol revisions they use.2026-10-21MCP server observations, October 20265,916 remote MCP endpoints on 21 October 2026: 60% signed in full, 32% signed as auth-gated, 8% unsigned; protocol revisions and 1,487 tool-list changes.2026-10-16How many tools does a remote MCP server expose? The median is sevenOf the 1,903 remote MCP servers whose tool list we could read, the median exposes 7 tools, 40% expose five or fewer, and 28 expose 100 or more.2026-10-14How often does an MCP server change its tools? One in five did within two weeksWe read 1,893 remote MCP servers' tool lists every 12 hours. 22% changed at least once; most changes only added tools, and a few servers made most of them.2026-10-13Tool descriptions that give orders to the agent reading themAn AI agent reads every MCP tool description before it picks a tool. Our probe flags a few patterns in that text; 409 of 26,575 tools matched one.2026-10-11Seven thousand tool snapshots, copied to cold storage byte for byteWe copied 7,102 tool snapshots from our database into gzip objects in cold storage. How we checked the copies, and what has not been copied yet.2026-10-01Your agent added an MCP server by itself. What do you actually know about it?Personal agents now add MCP servers on their own. No one can see from the outside what a server does with what your agent sends it, but some things can be checked: whether it answers, which tools it offers, and whether they changed. 236 of 1,470 servers in our directory did in 30 days.2026-09-30Which MCP protocol revision do servers answer with?Every probe starts by agreeing on a protocol revision, and every signed result records the one it got. Across the 1,004 servers whose latest result is signed, 580 ended on 2025-06-18, the revision our fallback offers, and 394 on 2026-07-28. What those two numbers do and do not say.2026-09-30Three in ten public MCP endpoints ask for a key before anything elseOf the 2,282 public MCP endpoints we observe, 694 answer our anonymous handshake with an authentication challenge. We never send credentials, so we have never seen their tools. What we can still observe about them without a key, and what that observation cannot tell you.2026-09-30The one call our probe sometimes holds backTo see how an MCP server refuses an unknown tool, our probe calls a name reserved for a tool that should not exist. A server could define that name, so the probe checks the tool list first and holds the call back when it cannot rule that out: 838 of 2,282 public endpoints on 2026-09-30.2026-09-30A rate that could only ever say 100 percentOn 2026-09-23, all 833 servers in our directory showed the same reachability figure: 100 percent. Not because they had all answered us every day, but because of how we counted. We found it while fact-checking a blog post. What was wrong, what we changed, and what the figure shows now.2026-09-24We asked 1,144 MCP servers for a made-up toolThe one tool call our probe makes names a made-up tool, to see how the server says no. Until this week we recorded 58% of signed servers as a risk for that check and could not say what they had answered. Now we record seven kinds of answer, and nine in ten of the flagged servers gave the same one.