papersSEP 12 04:00 UTC
Study Finds MCP Server Sampling Skews Toward Servers That Work
An arXiv paper argues that research into the Model Context Protocol server ecosystem relies on sampling methods that implicitly favor functioning servers, such as reference sets, popularity rankings, hand-picked collections, or pipelines that fix servers until they run. The authors examine what a random draw from the MCP registry actually returns and contrast it with the servers used in tool-use benchmarks. The work highlights how these sampling choices can distort findings about the ecosystem and about agent tool-use performance.