Bridging Protocol and Production: Design Patterns for Deploying AI Agents with Model Context Protocol

Researchers identify three critical gaps in the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that prevent AI agents from operating safely at production scale, despite MCP having over 10,000 active servers and 97 million monthly SDK downloads. The paper proposes three new mechanisms to address missing identity propagation, adaptive tool budgeting, and structured error semantics based on enterprise deployment experience.