Research · curated 21 Jul 2026

We Ran a Live Handshake Against 995 MCP Servers. Only 39 Are Verified.

Coverage timeline

7 Jul 2026mcpexplorer.com

Single-source research — first reported, latest, and curated coincide.

Why it matters

MCP servers hand agents callable tools that act on real accounts, so this measurement quantifies how much of the ecosystem exposes destructive or unverifiable tools that a defender would not want an autonomous agent wired into.

MCPExplorer ran a live MCP `tools/list` handshake against all 995 servers in its index on July 4, 2026; only 277 answered and just 39 met their verification bar. The scan found 59% of reachable servers expose at least one write tool, 67 expose destructive tools (e.g. `delete_instance`, `revoke_api_key`, `wipeLogs`), 467 have unknown provenance, and 30 different servers expose an identically-named `search` tool creating tool-name collision risks for agents.