The MCP conversation is moving fast, but the research signal is already clearer than the hype. Recent papers on audits, ecosystem attacks, malicious tools, and enterprise mitigations now point to the same conclusion: tool interoperability without policy discipline is fragile by default.
Tool-using AI apps are powerful, but the real risk is not the model alone. It is the invisible handoff between prompts, tools, permissions, and human approval. This playbook maps the boundary correctly.
New evaluation work shows that the quality of tool descriptions changes agent efficiency, execution cost, and task success. In other words, weak MCP tool descriptions are not cosmetic debt. They are system behavior debt.