Model Context Protocol (MCP) reached enterprise procurement gravity in 18 months, faster than typical interoperability standards. The 10,000+ active public MCP servers, adoption by ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and VS Code, and the December 2025 Linux Foundation donation made MCP a tooling-layer choice that ripples through every adjacent agentic-AI procurement decision: which agents connect to which enterprise systems, which audit boundaries hold, which vendor lock-in patterns activate. The actual procurement decision enterprise IT faces is not whether to adopt MCP (the question is moot once any approved tool ships MCP support); it is the scope-and-governance decision: which MCP servers the enterprise allows agents to connect to, what scopes those connections grant, and how cross-agent delegation through MCP is monitored. Treating MCP as a binary adoption question rather than a scope-and-governance question is the most common enterprise procurement mistake on this surface in 2026.

Claim is scoped to enterprise procurement decisions in 2026. The technical specification of MCP itself is stable and not in dispute. The procurement framing of MCP as a binary adoption question is structurally inadequate for environments where developer tools, productivity SaaS, and agent platforms ship MCP support without uniform IT governance review. 60-day review cadence. Watches: (1) Linux Foundation Agentic AI Foundation governance decisions on MCP that change the protocol's enterprise-suitability profile, (2) major vendors that lock down MCP server connections behind enterprise-admin approval (currently most do not), (3) emergence of MCP-server allow-lists or governance directories shipped at the IAM platform layer.