MCP for buyers and CTOs

• Part 1
  

  What to require from an MCP server vendor: a buyer’s checklist The questions to put to an MCP server vendor before you sign, drawn from the 2026-07-28 specification’s own requirements and the tests a server should pass, with what a good answer looks like.

• Part 2
  

  An MCP governance checklist for the CTO What a CTO has to decide before MCP servers reach a company’s AI tools: who controls each primitive, where the trust boundaries lie, which authorization model fits, and what the host must enforce.

• Part 3
  

  MCP maturity in October 2026: what’s stable, what’s deprecated, what’s still a bet Which parts of MCP a buyer can rely on in October 2026: the five revisions of the specification, what 2026-07-28 removed, how long a deprecated feature lasts, and the status of every extension.

• Part 4
  

  MCP host coverage: will the server work in the AI apps your company uses? Before you buy an MCP server, check it against the hosts your company runs: which features Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, VS Code, Cursor and Gemini CLI support in October 2026, and what to require as a result.