mcp

An Anthropic-signature integration question. The hidden rubric: tools are a curated product surface, not a proxy for your OpenAPI spec, plus the auth model and confused-deputy trap most candidates miss.

MCP turned 'install a plugin' into 'inject text into every conversation.' Interviewers ask this to see if you understand why tool descriptions are an attack surface, and what a least-privilege agent runtime looks like.

One backdoored MCP server can BCC every email an agent drafts, and a clean server can rug-pull its tool definitions a week after approval. This is a software supply-chain program for dependencies that talk, not a one-time review.

An agent with write access to a CRM, a chat tool, and an HR system is one bad tool call from emailing salaries to a channel. Safety is least-privilege scopes, a hard read/write split, human approval on destructive actions, and an audit log of everything.