MCP Access Control: How to Enforce Least Privilege Across AI Agent Tool Chains
When an enterprise deploys an MCP-powered AI agent, such as a coding assistant, a customer workflow automaton, an IT helpdesk bot, something quietly dangerous happens at startup. The agent inherits the full permission set of the application that launched it. If the orchestrating app holds write access to a production database, the MCP agent does too. If it can call financial APIs, trigger deployments, or read HR records, the agent inherits all of that, without ever explicitly being granted those rights.