Who owns the agent? What New York taught us about MCP governance

Discussions at a New York LEAP on Tour event highlighted governance, rather than model capability, as a principal obstacle to deploying Model Context Protocol (MCP) agents in production. Participants debated whether MCP should be managed by existing API platform teams or dedicated AI groups, while emphasizing that accountability should ultimately rest with the owner of the business KPI or return on investment the agent is intended to improve. Production readiness was framed as the ability for someone outside the development team to understand an agent’s purpose, authorization, and shutdown process, supported by strong API foundations including identity controls, rate limits, consistent errors, and inventory visibility. Speakers also stressed outcome-based evaluation in simulated environments, statistical monitoring of probabilistic outputs, automatic shutdown mechanisms, and curated MCP tools rather than direct one-to-one conversions of API endpoints. Cost and security concerns, including malicious traffic and uncontrolled token usage, can be addressed through scoped short-lived tokens, quotas, and per-tool rate limits. The event concluded that clear governance builds the trust needed for organizations to deploy agents more quickly, while European conversations increasingly add data and infrastructure sovereignty to the governance agenda.

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