What a Random Draw from the MCP Registry Contains, and What Tool-Use Benchmarks Contain Instead
Studies of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server ecosystem draw their samples in ways that quietly select for servers that work: reference sets, popularity lists, hand-curated frames, or pipelines that repair a server until it starts. We report what an unrepaired probability sample actually contains. From a 24,135-server registry census we draw 400 npm/stdio servers with a published seed and probe each one over the wire. Only 48.8% complete an initialize handshake, against 66.7% for a hand-curated frame measured with the same instrument, and the dominant failure is not missing credentials (13.3%) but servers that never start at all (37.5%). Among the 195 that do run, hard conformance is...
| Authors | Haseeb Mohammed Afsar |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 10 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 September 2026 |
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