Before you get too far into the usual “MCP is dead, Skills forever” debate
The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. This is valuable from a security perspective obviously. It’s also just a much easier user experience for normies and large businesses adopting AI tools. I hear all the context bloat and tool call redundancy complaints. But this structure for handling auth has real value.
Maybe the idealized form of MCP is just an auth gateway for the API and nothing else. That’d still be a win.
I’m work on a platform for restaurant reviewing with your friends, and (after a few stumbles) MCP definitely seems the way to go. Normies will not hunt down their claude directory and paste a skill file. “Connections” is something they understand, and pasting the mcp or finding it in the marketplace is easier for them.
TBD if having agent access to places and reviews is helpful, hah!
I think that this extension points out other benefits to MCP over skills:
* centralized control
* ease of use for employees
* auditing/compliance
* deployment model
It seems the state of the art for deploying skills is "copy this file and put it in this place" or "check out this repo and add a symlink" or "run this slash command to install the skill". (I'm not aware of any solution that pushes skills out.)
These options are simple, but not as easy as this extension makes rollout of a new MCP server to an employee.
All the points that you are mentioning, you can technically do with tools too. We do that at adaptive [1]. We are building privileges access stuff for agents, and it works. The usecases you are mentioning can be done with tools via our platform.
Mcp allows a fantastic audit trail also. As well as allowing segregation of responsibilities - ie authenticating 6 linear accounts across 6 clients and then deciding which one to use with deterministic audited methods
Aside from that, MCPs also allow connecting an external platform without a runtime environment. Every time this topic comes up, engineers act like Claude Code was the only application for AI agents, while there's tons of use cases in other verticals aside from coding. The harness is not running on a local machine, but rather an isolated and restricted container in some cloud deployment, where running arbitrary code would be a big nope. But you still want customers to be able to connect their existing tools to your agent.
MCP is the perfect answer for this - it gives an agent a connector with built-in authentication to all kinds of additional tooling. Skills just don't qualify here at all.
There’s even a skills over MCP WG; and I typically deliver skills via tools in my MCPs intentionally. I find Claude and codex recall of skills via MCP tools to actually be higher than skills themselves, which I feel have an (unmeasured) less than 30% recall rate. I have to typically force skills to be loaded explicitly through / or $ depending on the flavor and skill graphs are very unreliable.
I agree that having auth outside of context window is good.
But the real value of MCP is adding a semantic layer on top of APIs. Skills are client side and don’t know the server’s capabilities. MCP lets the server explain its API in natural language so clients who have no prior knowledge of the server, it’s API, or its domain can use it intelligently.
I used to think MCP was dumb. I’ve written to large MCP servers, one for CAD and one for music, and I am a complete convert.
I am currently trying to use Microsoft Entra ID auth for an MCP server I'm implementing, and I genuinely feel like I must be an idiot.
- I can use the `WWW-Authenticate` header to indicate a resource metadata URL for the client.
- I can use this to indicate an authorization server (Microsoft Entra) and a scope (for the app registration that handle which app roles each user is given to differentiate different capabilities for different users).
- I can NOT indicate a client_id, because that's just something that each client (agent) makes up on its own?
- To initiate a login on the .../authorize URL in Microsoft Entra, you need to pass a known client_id that matches an app registration in Microsoft Entra. Whatever the client makes up will surely not match anything in Microsoft Entra.
- I COULD in theory support dynamic client registration, but of course Microsoft Entra doesn't.
Is it even possible to make this work out of the box? The only way forward I can see is implementing my own dynamic client registration shim in front of Microsoft Entra that just returns the same static client_id to everyone, which matches an actual client_id in Microsoft Entra.
But surely this protocol actually works today for real Enterprises without workarounds? It feels like I must be missing something obvious.
I don't think you are missing anything obvious. Entra ID doesn't support DCR, and the state of the ecosystem here is suboptimal.
The typical way to do MCP OAuth is with traditional up-front registered clients. However, in practice a lot of MCP clients work with an assumption that DCR works, and as you point out don't offer an option to specify a client ID.
However, some clients do support that (ad: our tool Erato does[0]), and the typical solutions deployed in enterprises do, where MCP access is usually centralized via a web UI like ours. One alternative that also exists is are MCP gateways, which do pre-registred oauth between the gateway and service, and allow for DCR between the gateway and clients.
Then I build an authbroker application using openid to handle client registration and build the jwt. End result is something that can determine tool availability and permission using an employees department, or other criteria.
So yeah the dynamic client registration is needed.
We had the same issue with the client_id and for security reason we weren't willing to enable DCR.
What we ended up doing, was the app proxying the OAuth flow, to inject a hardcoded client_id. So we lie to the MCP client telling it we support DCR while behind the hood we use a standalone client_id as usual for the MCP.
Yeah, I recently documented how to use pre-registered clients with FusionAuth[0] (my employer). DCR's newer, better sibling CIMD is on our radar and under active discussion[1], but not currently available.
An alternative to the proxy you suggest is to generate a new Entra client id (with PKCE enabled) for every MCP client in a developer portal or similar, then have the user configure their client with that client id. Here's the CLI command I found to do this[2], but I bet there's an API too. Here are config instructions for Claude Code[3] and ChatGPT[4].
Client pre-registration is acceptable, but not optimal, for developers, and is a first class citizen in the spec[5]. If your main audience is internal and you can expect them to follow configuration instructions to get access to the MCP server, this approach can work.
But it's definitely not acceptable for widespread, public integrations if your audience is not developers. That is where a lot of the power and opportunity for MCP lies.
Huge congrats to the folks behind this at Okta, A\, Microsoft, Figma, Linear, etc...
For the MCP nay-sayers - don't worry there's something here for you too :)
This is powered by a new token format called an ID-JAG - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-oauth-identity-a... - and isn't MCP specific at all. ID-JAGs can be used for safe and secure data sharing anywhere where data is shared between applications that use the same SSO provider.
Hey folks - I am one of the folks at Anthropic that helped deliver this in partnership with Okta and a handful of MCP partners. We're very excited about this taking shape in Claude (in addition to the MCP spec, of course, where EMA is now a stable extension) and are looking to expand adoption to other identity providers and clients as well.
If you have any feedback, feel free to drop it in here! Always happy to hear about folks' experience and how we can make it better.
This is great for normal "apps". We have a really deep need for a lower touch way for our users to interact with us agentically without setting up MCP. It'd be really great to have some sort of temporary session or out-of-band token storage available.
Here's our use case: During the sales cycle, the buyer and seller need to exchange a bunch of information then analyze it (which is increasingly agentic). The problem with MCP is the initial setup friction is far greater than users login in themselves and grabbing the information they need. MCPs are great for regular, frequent interactions - but create a lot of problems for these quick one-off sessions.
We'd really love a way to do something like this:
* In Claude: "Grab documents from X, Y, Z"
* Claude hits that website, it returns (1) basic usage information (2) a login link that the user can open in their browser
* User auths in their browser (annoying, but mindless)
* That callback returns a unique, short-lived, one-time token that gets exchanged on all future requests to the site.
Now, we can quickly auth users AND maintain a session state as they do things.
> The problem with MCP is the initial setup friction is far greater than users login in themselves and grabbing the information they need.
Can you tell me more about this? With just-in-time client registration (DCR or CIMD) it seems like the MCP registration would be pretty simple.
Is it the configuration of the MCP client to know about the MCP server that is the issue?
Does the website need to be able to advertise "here's the corresponding MCP server" so that the "claude hits website" step becomes "claude hits website, discovers MCP server"?
Seems like the main use case is employees of companies. Is there an analogous use case/value for non-centralized users like customers or freemium users?
I'm struggling to think of one, but wonder what I'm missing.
Fantastic news. Is there any communication between you folks and the Microsoft Entra (Azure AD) team? Would love to know if we can expect this soon or if will take a while.
It is available! The feature is available in Claude, with Okta being the first IdP to support it (hopefully more coming soon) and with a bunch of MCP partners launching with us today.
The underlying extension has been in the MCP protocol for some time and is now officially stable.
Anthropic is the only one with human readable tool names from the JUNE 2025 spec! So you guys are doing a great job and this is another example.
I'm just curious internally how you are seeing MCP adoption? It seems more and more connectors are created but are you seeing real adoption from users?
You don't actually need to ask me for that - a lot of the data is very public, and we've been on a roll announcing MCP partnerships, and developer adoption keeps going up. There is always room to make the protocol better, but it certainly has a healthy foundation.
This is fantastic. Ive been so fortunate to work with the mcp folks last few months on a couple of the SEPs (and my own experimental sdk in go). I used to be a naysayer. "Its just apis" I used to say. "Sheesh the invented another abstraction" I used to say.
What folks dont realize is it is the "P" in MCP that throws people off. When you build a traditional app you have to build forms, ui, req/response handling, bidirectional channels, long running tasks, auth and so on.
With mcp 80% of this common layer is taken care for you. So mcp is really an "app framework" than a protocol (well there is that too).
Unified auth is a huuuge boost. Can't wait to see more cool things!
Read it multiple times, its definitely useful, centralizes the audit and access in one place (with IDP). The IDP can very well act as a proxy API gateway taking care of token exchange when required instead of putting the onus on Client. Thats another approach which has been adopted by some other players in this domain.
On a personal level, what I felt bit uncomfortable with is this idea of access being delegated on my behalf by IDP to client without making me aware about it. May be I am too used to the concept of user presence in the flows that happens on browser. This it evolving more towards centralizing the access for the machines.
Given in the enterprise environment the identity really belongs to the company instead of individual, its probably acceptable.
How its gets incorporated in customer identity is altogether a different challenge. Its probably not possible to have this kind of trust between IDP, client and the resource authorization server.
There's theoretically nothing really stopping this integration from working in the consumer space - you just need to establish a trust relationship (e.g., if I am logged in with GitHub, also log me in to Sentry automatically). There is more work ahead here, but as you said - the most obvious _current_ use-case is enterprises, where admins do not want individual employees clicking around picking random credentials they have.
At the end of the day its wiring the flows to serve a purpose and can be wired in multiple ways. Some combination of client, IDP and resource server can come together to form a band and may provide this for consumer identity.
Reasons why this is a bad idea for consumer identity -
1. In Enterprise, the IDP is the single owner for the identity, so it essentially can do represent the user uniquely and sort of pretty much do anything it wishes for (includes deleting the identity)
2. In enterprise the IDP is the single authentication factor used by the downstream resource server (application), in other words the application just trusts the assertion
3. For consumer identity, the resource server owns the identity/user explicitly. Github may be one of the authentication factors that the user can use, but it may not be the only one.
4. For consumer identity, Github cannot delete the user account in downstream application.
Regardless, this protocol is going to create friction in adoption of new AI agents and MCP servers, to sell to enterprise they have to implement this and integrate with existing IDP's and resource servers. Using any new MCP server would require full evaluation lifecycle from security perspective. Its a good thing but its going to hurt the new players pretty bad in terms of adoption and discovery.
Hey - one of the lead maintainers of the MCP project here. There are a lot of scenarios where this simply won't scale (both from a usability and security standpoint). Cookies were made for the browser. MCP servers and clients often operate in environments where that is not a guarantee.
I've been working on an MCP for creating semi-deterministic flows in Claude code (essentially skills, but broken down into pieces). In order to track execution and state, I have the LLM pass the MCP a unique "execution id" with every call. This lets me programmatically step it through skills and know exactly where execution progress is.
I've been considering a similar approach for the web. Essentially, do a short-lived, one-time use token exchange for every single call back and forth.
* LLM: "I'd like to interact with your site"
* Site: "Great, here's first token. I will exchange it for a new one on the next call. Do not share with with another site. You can authenticate in your browser with this link: [example.com]"
* Then you can go back and forth.
It'd be rather annoying to auth in the browser every time, but it would enable a low-touch flow.
Long term, it'd be ideal to have some sort of out-of-band credential store/tool available, but this would start proving the concept out. Don't use it for highly sensitive stuff, but it would enable a lot of agentic flows that are currently blocked by high-lift MCP setup.
Many times what the server returns is dictated by what kind of client software a user is using. Cookies are obviously used by browser based clients, with full browser capabilities. MCP doesn't have those capabilities. How will the server know what to return?
I have separated handling for token based calls vs cookie based in my non-mcp projects.. because it suffers from the same issue.
Most of the endpoints, assuming the client talks to server using api's, work fine with cookies, some, do not.
Oh wow - seeing my own work in the wild is ... wild. I implemented the RAS end of this for Atlassian. There will certainly be iterations around this flow - CIMD, better tenancy support, etc., but all the folks involved in delivering this at Anthropic, Okta, and here at Atlassian were fantastic.
MCP auth has been a huge pain point for us at C1 - both for our own internal MCP use and in our in-product MCP Gateway - so very glad to see this landing.
We launched support today for C1 to act as an EMA identity provider (we mint the short-lived scoped tokens), so I'm excited to hook this up for Linear and some of the other MCPs we use, and get out of the business of constant OAuth flows. Claude has been doing this magically for some of their built-in connectors (at least Slack I think) and the experience is pretty great.
In regular OAuth, end users consent to share their data with applications individually. This makes sense for consumer usecases, where the end users own their data. But it doesn't make sense for many business usecases, where the business is the entity that should control data sharing and access, not the end user. As an employee at Acme, I shouldn't decide to link my Acme Google Drive data to Claude or ChatGPT, that should be the decision of my IT Department.
Enterprise-Managed OAuth, or Cross App Access (XAA), brings this IT-Admin centrally controlled sharing model into the OAuth framework so it works with the existing ecosystem.
There's also a great UX benefit from moving data sharing consent management from employees to IT Admins - it means that employees don't need to sit through a bunch of OAuth flows to link their accounts together. Their IT Admin has already set up all the sharing controls. Everything plugs in together and should Just Work from day one. Think joining a new company on the first day and your Slack is already linked to your Zoom, your Drive, your Calendar, etc...
Sure, if I’m a business, I will make a business decision to share, or not share, some resource with ChatGPT. But, if I do decide to share something with ChatGPT, I absolutely do NOT want it shared with every single ChatGPT thread, more or less how I don’t want it shared with every single tab an employee has open in a browser.
Advantage is user has no control/is not needed to consent about what apps they're authorizing to share their information between each other, bacause the decision to delegate access is at the IdP policy level. User many never know which apps/services were authorized to share their information. Wait, is that an advantage? ;-)
For organizations it's definitely an advandtage, as it also allows for preventing data flowing to personal accounts. Right now, any employee could knowingly or unknowingly exfiltrate data, by just connecting to e.g. the personal instead of the organization's JIRA account, and there is essentially no standard way to guard against that as an organization.
That's also blind spot in normal OAuth and I was surprised to find that this was never addressed in all the years that non-MCP OAuth found adoption.
Yeah, I read this and thought "makes total sense that Okta would be one of the prime movers behind this". The more I think about it, the more this is just like an app dashboard that an employee can use to access many different apps and that the enterprise can use to control and monitor access. So it makes total sense that they solved this (very real) problem.
I like one of the author's characterizations[0].
> Now employees no longer have to connect MCP servers manually and wait for a series of OAuth and login prompts. Once you log in to Claude from Okta, all the preconfigured MCP servers are already connected! It's not every day you get to improve both usability and security!
Wait this is awesome. A huge issue with Enterprise OAuth2.0 is managing all the random apps. Each with their own half-baked enterprise controls for managing scopes, token expiry, and no control over device bound sessions.
So instead, you can run centralized infra to validate a user, device, what scopes their requesting and duration, and enforce policies for all your apps?
What's interesting about this standard is that it's not really MCP-specific. It can work just as nicely for any other workload - it just requires the authorization server/IdP to support it and the receiver to know how to handle the trust relationship.
Auth has been a wild journey in MCP. It really is a valuable differentiator to things like Skills for enterprises though. Congrats to the team on the ship.
We're always looking at making it a smoother experience - it's a top pain point for developers and IT admins alike. If you have feedback - feel free to send it my way!
This actually looks like a far better use-case for MCPs than the previous per-user per server MCP design which that was completely rushed and made no sense.
You can tell with this Anthropic consulted with experts first on the design and implementation of this rather than vibe coding the spec in isolation. Unless the user themselves is compromised and connects via the Enterprise-Managed Authorization, at least you can remotely revoke permissions / access to reduce that risk.
FWIW, we never vibe-coded the spec to begin with, but yes - auth is a continuous learning process, and we're lucky to collaborate with some really talented folks both inside and outside the company (e.g., this launch we worked closely with Okta to see how we can best wire things up) to make this a smoother experience. Keep the feedback coming!
Why do people downvote this.. If your mediocre ai agent needs to use something that requires authentication you should be abstracting away the authentication, provide it a cli with cmds that have authentication baked in.
Before you get too far into the usual “MCP is dead, Skills forever” debate
The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. This is valuable from a security perspective obviously. It’s also just a much easier user experience for normies and large businesses adopting AI tools. I hear all the context bloat and tool call redundancy complaints. But this structure for handling auth has real value.
Maybe the idealized form of MCP is just an auth gateway for the API and nothing else. That’d still be a win.
I’m work on a platform for restaurant reviewing with your friends, and (after a few stumbles) MCP definitely seems the way to go. Normies will not hunt down their claude directory and paste a skill file. “Connections” is something they understand, and pasting the mcp or finding it in the marketplace is easier for them.
TBD if having agent access to places and reviews is helpful, hah!
"Normies" pasting in MCP sounds like a nightmare from a security perspective.
I think that this extension points out other benefits to MCP over skills:
It seems the state of the art for deploying skills is "copy this file and put it in this place" or "check out this repo and add a symlink" or "run this slash command to install the skill". (I'm not aware of any solution that pushes skills out.)
These options are simple, but not as easy as this extension makes rollout of a new MCP server to an employee.
There's a new standard in progress for skills over MCP
https://modelcontextprotocol.io/community/working-groups/ski...
Isn’t tool drift/version also a benefit? Especially in scenarios where the use must be standardized and up to date?
All the points that you are mentioning, you can technically do with tools too. We do that at adaptive [1]. We are building privileges access stuff for agents, and it works. The usecases you are mentioning can be done with tools via our platform.
[1] https://adaptive.live
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Mcp allows a fantastic audit trail also. As well as allowing segregation of responsibilities - ie authenticating 6 linear accounts across 6 clients and then deciding which one to use with deterministic audited methods
MCP tool search fixes the major issue imo, MCP clears skills/clis in every other way
Aside from that, MCPs also allow connecting an external platform without a runtime environment. Every time this topic comes up, engineers act like Claude Code was the only application for AI agents, while there's tons of use cases in other verticals aside from coding. The harness is not running on a local machine, but rather an isolated and restricted container in some cloud deployment, where running arbitrary code would be a big nope. But you still want customers to be able to connect their existing tools to your agent.
MCP is the perfect answer for this - it gives an agent a connector with built-in authentication to all kinds of additional tooling. Skills just don't qualify here at all.
> The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is
The real lesson is that MCP vs skills is not a binary. They are simply different tools. Each may or may not be better given different requirements.
Which is better, a knife or a saw?
There’s even a skills over MCP WG; and I typically deliver skills via tools in my MCPs intentionally. I find Claude and codex recall of skills via MCP tools to actually be higher than skills themselves, which I feel have an (unmeasured) less than 30% recall rate. I have to typically force skills to be loaded explicitly through / or $ depending on the flavor and skill graphs are very unreliable.
I agree that having auth outside of context window is good.
But the real value of MCP is adding a semantic layer on top of APIs. Skills are client side and don’t know the server’s capabilities. MCP lets the server explain its API in natural language so clients who have no prior knowledge of the server, it’s API, or its domain can use it intelligently.
I used to think MCP was dumb. I’ve written to large MCP servers, one for CAD and one for music, and I am a complete convert.
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I am currently trying to use Microsoft Entra ID auth for an MCP server I'm implementing, and I genuinely feel like I must be an idiot.
- I can use the `WWW-Authenticate` header to indicate a resource metadata URL for the client.
- I can use this to indicate an authorization server (Microsoft Entra) and a scope (for the app registration that handle which app roles each user is given to differentiate different capabilities for different users).
- I can NOT indicate a client_id, because that's just something that each client (agent) makes up on its own?
- To initiate a login on the .../authorize URL in Microsoft Entra, you need to pass a known client_id that matches an app registration in Microsoft Entra. Whatever the client makes up will surely not match anything in Microsoft Entra.
- I COULD in theory support dynamic client registration, but of course Microsoft Entra doesn't.
Is it even possible to make this work out of the box? The only way forward I can see is implementing my own dynamic client registration shim in front of Microsoft Entra that just returns the same static client_id to everyone, which matches an actual client_id in Microsoft Entra.
But surely this protocol actually works today for real Enterprises without workarounds? It feels like I must be missing something obvious.
I don't think you are missing anything obvious. Entra ID doesn't support DCR, and the state of the ecosystem here is suboptimal.
The typical way to do MCP OAuth is with traditional up-front registered clients. However, in practice a lot of MCP clients work with an assumption that DCR works, and as you point out don't offer an option to specify a client ID.
However, some clients do support that (ad: our tool Erato does[0]), and the typical solutions deployed in enterprises do, where MCP access is usually centralized via a web UI like ours. One alternative that also exists is are MCP gateways, which do pre-registred oauth between the gateway and service, and allow for DCR between the gateway and clients.
[0]: https://erato.chat/docs
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I actually implemented this yesterday. The gist is this library runs the MCP server: https://csharp.sdk.modelcontextprotocol.io/concepts/identity...
Then I build an authbroker application using openid to handle client registration and build the jwt. End result is something that can determine tool availability and permission using an employees department, or other criteria.
So yeah the dynamic client registration is needed.
We had the same issue with the client_id and for security reason we weren't willing to enable DCR.
What we ended up doing, was the app proxying the OAuth flow, to inject a hardcoded client_id. So we lie to the MCP client telling it we support DCR while behind the hood we use a standalone client_id as usual for the MCP.
If you want to take example at it https://gist.github.com/erebe/a5de36d42214721b2466fb0e66f61c...
Depending on the setup, you just have to be really careful to avoid confused deputy scenarios.
I wrote about it: https://den.dev/blog/mcp-confused-deputy-api-management/
Yeah, I recently documented how to use pre-registered clients with FusionAuth[0] (my employer). DCR's newer, better sibling CIMD is on our radar and under active discussion[1], but not currently available.
An alternative to the proxy you suggest is to generate a new Entra client id (with PKCE enabled) for every MCP client in a developer portal or similar, then have the user configure their client with that client id. Here's the CLI command I found to do this[2], but I bet there's an API too. Here are config instructions for Claude Code[3] and ChatGPT[4].
Client pre-registration is acceptable, but not optimal, for developers, and is a first class citizen in the spec[5]. If your main audience is internal and you can expect them to follow configuration instructions to get access to the MCP server, this approach can work.
But it's definitely not acceptable for widespread, public integrations if your audience is not developers. That is where a lot of the power and opportunity for MCP lies.
0: https://fusionauth.io/docs/extend/examples/controlling-acces...
1: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/3230
2: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/ad/app?view=azur...
3: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/mcp
4: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/developer-mode
5: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/bas...
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Huge congrats to the folks behind this at Okta, A\, Microsoft, Figma, Linear, etc...
For the MCP nay-sayers - don't worry there's something here for you too :)
This is powered by a new token format called an ID-JAG - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-oauth-identity-a... - and isn't MCP specific at all. ID-JAGs can be used for safe and secure data sharing anywhere where data is shared between applications that use the same SSO provider.
Software and quality of life is worst because of these companies. So congrats to them indeed.
Hey folks - I am one of the folks at Anthropic that helped deliver this in partnership with Okta and a handful of MCP partners. We're very excited about this taking shape in Claude (in addition to the MCP spec, of course, where EMA is now a stable extension) and are looking to expand adoption to other identity providers and clients as well.
If you have any feedback, feel free to drop it in here! Always happy to hear about folks' experience and how we can make it better.
This is great for normal "apps". We have a really deep need for a lower touch way for our users to interact with us agentically without setting up MCP. It'd be really great to have some sort of temporary session or out-of-band token storage available.
Here's our use case: During the sales cycle, the buyer and seller need to exchange a bunch of information then analyze it (which is increasingly agentic). The problem with MCP is the initial setup friction is far greater than users login in themselves and grabbing the information they need. MCPs are great for regular, frequent interactions - but create a lot of problems for these quick one-off sessions.
We'd really love a way to do something like this:
* In Claude: "Grab documents from X, Y, Z"
* Claude hits that website, it returns (1) basic usage information (2) a login link that the user can open in their browser
* User auths in their browser (annoying, but mindless)
* That callback returns a unique, short-lived, one-time token that gets exchanged on all future requests to the site.
Now, we can quickly auth users AND maintain a session state as they do things.
> The problem with MCP is the initial setup friction is far greater than users login in themselves and grabbing the information they need.
Can you tell me more about this? With just-in-time client registration (DCR or CIMD) it seems like the MCP registration would be pretty simple.
Is it the configuration of the MCP client to know about the MCP server that is the issue?
Does the website need to be able to advertise "here's the corresponding MCP server" so that the "claude hits website" step becomes "claude hits website, discovers MCP server"?
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Hiya, congrats on shipping!
Seems like the main use case is employees of companies. Is there an analogous use case/value for non-centralized users like customers or freemium users?
I'm struggling to think of one, but wonder what I'm missing.
Edit: I see you addressed this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48594381
Fantastic news. Is there any communication between you folks and the Microsoft Entra (Azure AD) team? Would love to know if we can expect this soon or if will take a while.
We are in touch with the Microsoft Entra ID folks to see how we can better integrate EMA in their stack!
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Great work, thank you for doing this. Just so I understand, this isn't yet available yet, right? Still in SEP stage?
It is available! The feature is available in Claude, with Okta being the first IdP to support it (hopefully more coming soon) and with a bunch of MCP partners launching with us today.
The underlying extension has been in the MCP protocol for some time and is now officially stable.
Anthropic is the only one with human readable tool names from the JUNE 2025 spec! So you guys are doing a great job and this is another example.
I'm just curious internally how you are seeing MCP adoption? It seems more and more connectors are created but are you seeing real adoption from users?
You don't actually need to ask me for that - a lot of the data is very public, and we've been on a roll announcing MCP partnerships, and developer adoption keeps going up. There is always room to make the protocol better, but it certainly has a healthy foundation.
> zero touch
> look inside
> there's a touch
This is fantastic. Ive been so fortunate to work with the mcp folks last few months on a couple of the SEPs (and my own experimental sdk in go). I used to be a naysayer. "Its just apis" I used to say. "Sheesh the invented another abstraction" I used to say.
What folks dont realize is it is the "P" in MCP that throws people off. When you build a traditional app you have to build forms, ui, req/response handling, bidirectional channels, long running tasks, auth and so on.
With mcp 80% of this common layer is taken care for you. So mcp is really an "app framework" than a protocol (well there is that too).
Unified auth is a huuuge boost. Can't wait to see more cool things!
Read it multiple times, its definitely useful, centralizes the audit and access in one place (with IDP). The IDP can very well act as a proxy API gateway taking care of token exchange when required instead of putting the onus on Client. Thats another approach which has been adopted by some other players in this domain.
On a personal level, what I felt bit uncomfortable with is this idea of access being delegated on my behalf by IDP to client without making me aware about it. May be I am too used to the concept of user presence in the flows that happens on browser. This it evolving more towards centralizing the access for the machines.
Given in the enterprise environment the identity really belongs to the company instead of individual, its probably acceptable.
How its gets incorporated in customer identity is altogether a different challenge. Its probably not possible to have this kind of trust between IDP, client and the resource authorization server.
There's theoretically nothing really stopping this integration from working in the consumer space - you just need to establish a trust relationship (e.g., if I am logged in with GitHub, also log me in to Sentry automatically). There is more work ahead here, but as you said - the most obvious _current_ use-case is enterprises, where admins do not want individual employees clicking around picking random credentials they have.
At the end of the day its wiring the flows to serve a purpose and can be wired in multiple ways. Some combination of client, IDP and resource server can come together to form a band and may provide this for consumer identity.
Reasons why this is a bad idea for consumer identity -
1. In Enterprise, the IDP is the single owner for the identity, so it essentially can do represent the user uniquely and sort of pretty much do anything it wishes for (includes deleting the identity)
2. In enterprise the IDP is the single authentication factor used by the downstream resource server (application), in other words the application just trusts the assertion
3. For consumer identity, the resource server owns the identity/user explicitly. Github may be one of the authentication factors that the user can use, but it may not be the only one.
4. For consumer identity, Github cannot delete the user account in downstream application.
Regardless, this protocol is going to create friction in adoption of new AI agents and MCP servers, to sell to enterprise they have to implement this and integrate with existing IDP's and resource servers. Using any new MCP server would require full evaluation lifecycle from security perspective. Its a good thing but its going to hurt the new players pretty bad in terms of adoption and discovery.
If only they would support the web and let you just issue a long running cookie....
I hacked the spec to pass through a cookie via the oauth handshake to do this without needing an oauth server.
Its really dumb they don't want to allow this.
If no cookie, open webpage.
If cookie set, close and persist.
I literally wrote an 80 page mini book on MCP yet it frustrates me to no end.
Hey - one of the lead maintainers of the MCP project here. There are a lot of scenarios where this simply won't scale (both from a usability and security standpoint). Cookies were made for the browser. MCP servers and clients often operate in environments where that is not a guarantee.
I've been working on an MCP for creating semi-deterministic flows in Claude code (essentially skills, but broken down into pieces). In order to track execution and state, I have the LLM pass the MCP a unique "execution id" with every call. This lets me programmatically step it through skills and know exactly where execution progress is.
I've been considering a similar approach for the web. Essentially, do a short-lived, one-time use token exchange for every single call back and forth.
* LLM: "I'd like to interact with your site"
* Site: "Great, here's first token. I will exchange it for a new one on the next call. Do not share with with another site. You can authenticate in your browser with this link: [example.com]"
* Then you can go back and forth.
It'd be rather annoying to auth in the browser every time, but it would enable a low-touch flow.
Long term, it'd be ideal to have some sort of out-of-band credential store/tool available, but this would start proving the concept out. Don't use it for highly sensitive stuff, but it would enable a lot of agentic flows that are currently blocked by high-lift MCP setup.
Agree.
Many times what the server returns is dictated by what kind of client software a user is using. Cookies are obviously used by browser based clients, with full browser capabilities. MCP doesn't have those capabilities. How will the server know what to return?
I have separated handling for token based calls vs cookie based in my non-mcp projects.. because it suffers from the same issue.
Most of the endpoints, assuming the client talks to server using api's, work fine with cookies, some, do not.
You're just asking for your credentials to get stolen. Long lived creds are a huge liability.
Oh wow - seeing my own work in the wild is ... wild. I implemented the RAS end of this for Atlassian. There will certainly be iterations around this flow - CIMD, better tenancy support, etc., but all the folks involved in delivering this at Anthropic, Okta, and here at Atlassian were fantastic.
Was great collaborating with you and your team on this!
Same!
MCP auth has been a huge pain point for us at C1 - both for our own internal MCP use and in our in-product MCP Gateway - so very glad to see this landing.
We launched support today for C1 to act as an EMA identity provider (we mint the short-lived scoped tokens), so I'm excited to hook this up for Linear and some of the other MCPs we use, and get out of the business of constant OAuth flows. Claude has been doing this magically for some of their built-in connectors (at least Slack I think) and the experience is pretty great.
Disclosure: VPE at C1. We wrote up how we’re approaching it here if anyone’s in the weeds on this: https://www.c1.ai/docs/product/admin/enterprise-managed-auth...
Love more adoption of EMA and, of course, better infra for MCP developers. Thanks for such a quick turnaround on this feature work!
I don't quite understand the advantage of this over regular oauth. I think I need an example comparison of the authz flows.
In regular OAuth, end users consent to share their data with applications individually. This makes sense for consumer usecases, where the end users own their data. But it doesn't make sense for many business usecases, where the business is the entity that should control data sharing and access, not the end user. As an employee at Acme, I shouldn't decide to link my Acme Google Drive data to Claude or ChatGPT, that should be the decision of my IT Department.
Enterprise-Managed OAuth, or Cross App Access (XAA), brings this IT-Admin centrally controlled sharing model into the OAuth framework so it works with the existing ecosystem.
There's also a great UX benefit from moving data sharing consent management from employees to IT Admins - it means that employees don't need to sit through a bunch of OAuth flows to link their accounts together. Their IT Admin has already set up all the sharing controls. Everything plugs in together and should Just Work from day one. Think joining a new company on the first day and your Slack is already linked to your Zoom, your Drive, your Calendar, etc...
This is bonkers.
Sure, if I’m a business, I will make a business decision to share, or not share, some resource with ChatGPT. But, if I do decide to share something with ChatGPT, I absolutely do NOT want it shared with every single ChatGPT thread, more or less how I don’t want it shared with every single tab an employee has open in a browser.
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Advantage is user has no control/is not needed to consent about what apps they're authorizing to share their information between each other, bacause the decision to delegate access is at the IdP policy level. User many never know which apps/services were authorized to share their information. Wait, is that an advantage? ;-)
For organizations it's definitely an advandtage, as it also allows for preventing data flowing to personal accounts. Right now, any employee could knowingly or unknowingly exfiltrate data, by just connecting to e.g. the personal instead of the organization's JIRA account, and there is essentially no standard way to guard against that as an organization.
That's also blind spot in normal OAuth and I was surprised to find that this was never addressed in all the years that non-MCP OAuth found adoption.
For your employee account yes its an advantage, and thats the target. Your personal account will still require consents.
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Looks like something which will be only helpful for bigger companies who have centralised auth. Good step nonetheless
Yeah, I read this and thought "makes total sense that Okta would be one of the prime movers behind this". The more I think about it, the more this is just like an app dashboard that an employee can use to access many different apps and that the enterprise can use to control and monitor access. So it makes total sense that they solved this (very real) problem.
I like one of the author's characterizations[0].
> Now employees no longer have to connect MCP servers manually and wait for a series of OAuth and login prompts. Once you log in to Claude from Okta, all the preconfigured MCP servers are already connected! It's not every day you get to improve both usability and security!
0: https://aaronparecki.com/2026/06/18/12/claude
Wait this is awesome. A huge issue with Enterprise OAuth2.0 is managing all the random apps. Each with their own half-baked enterprise controls for managing scopes, token expiry, and no control over device bound sessions.
So instead, you can run centralized infra to validate a user, device, what scopes their requesting and duration, and enforce policies for all your apps?
Can we get this in other OAuth 2.0 clients?
The standard itself is not MCP-specific. As long as the client and the server adopt ID-JAG, they're golden.
RFC draft: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-oauth-identity-a...
Need this for CLI tools like gcloud, knife, npm, etc. Maybe an Okta based JWT.
What's interesting about this standard is that it's not really MCP-specific. It can work just as nicely for any other workload - it just requires the authorization server/IdP to support it and the receiver to know how to handle the trust relationship.
Auth has been a wild journey in MCP. It really is a valuable differentiator to things like Skills for enterprises though. Congrats to the team on the ship.
We're always looking at making it a smoother experience - it's a top pain point for developers and IT admins alike. If you have feedback - feel free to send it my way!
I have my chatbot command my chatbot.
This actually looks like a far better use-case for MCPs than the previous per-user per server MCP design which that was completely rushed and made no sense.
You can tell with this Anthropic consulted with experts first on the design and implementation of this rather than vibe coding the spec in isolation. Unless the user themselves is compromised and connects via the Enterprise-Managed Authorization, at least you can remotely revoke permissions / access to reduce that risk.
We'll see, but give credit where credit is due.
FWIW, we never vibe-coded the spec to begin with, but yes - auth is a continuous learning process, and we're lucky to collaborate with some really talented folks both inside and outside the company (e.g., this launch we worked closely with Okta to see how we can best wire things up) to make this a smoother experience. Keep the feedback coming!
"Watson you have a blazing talent for observing the obvious" - Sherlock Homes
Why does my text autocomplete cli need an ability to sign into things?
Why do people downvote this.. If your mediocre ai agent needs to use something that requires authentication you should be abstracting away the authentication, provide it a cli with cmds that have authentication baked in.
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thank you mr. LLM
my account is too new I can't flag them :/
I thought we’re over this collective delusion called MCP
Why is it delusion? What are better ways to make LLM talk to other services?
I thought we were all smarter than directly giving agents access to all of our long lived tokens
MCP is just an API designed to be token frugal
Frugal is definitely not a word i would use in the same sentence as mcp
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