Why MCP Protocol Cannot Enforce Business Logic or Authorization Decisions

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The Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a standardized way for AI agents to discover and invoke tools across systems, solving a real interoperability problem in connecting applications to APIs and databases. However, MCP's design does not address whether a requested business action is actually authorized under organizational policy — only whether the technical connection and input schema are valid. In a practical example, an agent executing an employee offboarding request may successfully call the correct tool with valid arguments, yet still act prematurely if it cannot verify who holds authority over the termination time. Production workflows typically involve multiple distinct identities — requester, actor, subject, and approver — and collapsing these roles leads to misleading audit trails regardless of whether OAuth tokens are used correctly. Business rules, policy enforcement, and multi-party authorization must therefore be layered on top of MCP by the surrounding system, not assumed to be handled by the protocol itself.

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