That last part matters because MCP is important, but it isn’t enough. Anthropic introduced MCP in November 2024 as an open standard for connecting AI systems to tools and data. Later, they donated it to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation to keep it neutral and community-driven. It worked. Anthropic reports there are now more than 10,000 active public MCP servers and support across ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and VS Code.
That’s awesome, but it’s also not enough. Why? Because a protocol isn’t a platform. A protocol can help an agent talk to a tool, but it doesn’t, by itself, tell an enterprise who approved that agent, what data it can touch, how its actions are logged, or how to shut it down safely when the human who launched it has left the company.
Meeting users where they are
That’s where Stacklok’s self-hosted, Kubernetes-native bias starts to look smart rather than stodgy. (Though, again, “stodgy” isn’t a bad thing for risk-averse enterprises.) McLuckie is blunt: “If you’re an enterprise connecting agents to sensitive data, you are almost certainly not comfortable with that data egressing your security domain or being sent to a SaaS endpoint that a vendor controls.” We’ve seen this movie before. When your hosting, identity, tool integration, and policy layers all belong to the same vendor, “choice” starts to mean “replatform.”
