Definition

What is an MCP Server?

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A server that implements the Model Context Protocol, exposing data and tools to MCP-compatible AI clients.

An MCP server is what AI tools like Claude Desktop connect to in order to access external context. Wire automatically creates an MCP server for each context container, with custom tools tailored to your data. Your AI tools can browse, search, and query your context without any manual configuration.

Related MCP (Model Context Protocol) Context Container

Further reading

Articles about MCP Server

MCP authorization decides what context agents see

MCP authorization became a context control plane in 2026. RFC 8707 token scoping decides which sources an agent can ever pull into its own context window.

Stateless MCP: the spec is dropping session state

The 2026 MCP release candidate goes stateless: no initialize handshake, no session ID, any server instance answers any request. What stateless MCP means.

MCP Tasks: long-running work as context offloading

MCP Tasks let a server return a durable handle instead of a blocking result, keeping a long-running tool call's interim state off the agent's context window.

Your MCP server is installed. Your agent isn't using it.

Connecting an MCP server is easy. Getting an agent to call its tools on the first relevant turn is where teams lose, and the cause is context.

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All terms

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Agent Drift AI Agent AI Hallucination AI Second Brain Context as a Service Context Compression Context Container Context Drift Context Engineering Context Offloading Context Poisoning Context Portability Context Rot Context Window Epistemic Provenance Fine-Tuning MCP Resources MCP Server MCP (Model Context Protocol) Multi-Agent System Prompt Caching Prompt Engineering RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) Semantic Search Structured Context Tool Poisoning Wire

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