MCP Governance
MCP governance is the control layer around the Model Context Protocol: which agents may connect to which MCP servers, which tools and actions they may invoke, what credentials they use, and what evidence each call produces.
What MCP governance means
MCP standardized how AI agents reach tools; governance decides what the connection may carry. Before MCP, an agent's reach was whatever its developers hard-coded. With MCP, one configuration line can connect an agent to file systems, databases, payment tools and communication channels — often with the developer's own credentials. The protocol works as designed; what the protocol does not ask is "should this agent be allowed to do this?" MCP governance answers that before the call, with six pillars: per-agent identity (never a human's token), scoped credentials per tool and action, a policy gateway that checks every call before execution, approval gates for consequential actions, a record of every interaction, and an inventory of servers, agents and owners. The moment one MCP server is shared between two people, "who has access to what" becomes a question that must have an answer.
Frequently asked questions
Why do agents need separate governance for MCP?
Because MCP changes the blast radius. The protocol makes tool access trivially easy to grant and hard to see in aggregate. Governance restores the deliberate decisions: scoped credentials, checked calls, approvals and evidence — before execution, not after an incident.
What is an MCP gateway?
A gateway sits between the agent's MCP client and the MCP servers, verifying identity, checking each tool call against policy, blocking or gating actions beyond the agent's grants, and writing an evidence record — the API-gateway pattern applied to agent tool calls.