MCP Adoption Statistics 2026: Registry, SDK and CVE Data

MCP Adoption at a Glance

No single number captures MCP adoption. The official MCP Registry is the closest thing to a census of public servers: on October 21, 2026 it listed 47,267 active servers. Anthropic’s figure of more than 10,000 active public servers dates from December 2025 and is its latest published count. Neither figure includes the private servers that companies run for internal use.

Downloads tell the same story. The official TypeScript SDK was downloaded 231.9M times from npm in September 2026, against 31.3M a year earlier, and the Python SDK 260.8M times from PyPI in the 30 days to October 20. The MCP project put the combined rate across its Tier 1 SDKs at close to half a billion a month in July 2026.

The Official MCP Registry in Numbers

The official registry opened in preview in September 2025 as a central index of publicly available servers. Publishers verify a namespace, either a GitHub account or a domain, and submit metadata; the registry points to packages on npm, PyPI and other hosts rather than storing code. The MCP project counted close to 2,000 entries in November 2025. On October 21, 2026 the registry held 166,511 version records for 47,879 server names, 47,267 of them active.

Growth has accelerated through 2026. Of the servers listed today, 1,204 were first published by the end of 2025, 9,599 by late May and 25,761 by the end of August, and 11,869 were added in September alone. Some publishers list servers in bulk: the ten largest publishing namespaces account for 16.6% of active servers, while 91% of the 29,387 publishers list a single server.

Most registry servers are now hosted services: 66% of active servers list a remote endpoint, almost all of them on Streamable HTTP. Servers distributed as packages to run locally mostly use npm and the stdio transport.

SDK Downloads

Download counts are the most frequently updated adoption signal and the easiest to misread. npm and PyPI count downloads, not users: an automated build that reinstalls its dependencies on every run adds to the total each time. They are still a fair guide to trend. npm downloads of the TypeScript SDK rose from 102,851 in December 2024 to 38.5M in December 2025 and 231.9M in September 2026.

Anthropic’s figure of 97M+ monthly SDK downloads, from December 2025, is still widely quoted but predates most of that growth. In July 2026 the MCP project gave close to half a billion a month across its Tier 1 SDKs, with the TypeScript and Python SDKs each past 1 billion downloads in total.

GitHub Activity

GitHub topics give only a rough count of MCP projects, because owners choose whether to tag their repositories. The mcp-server topic covered 38,336 public repositories on October 21, 2026. Of the repositories created by the end of 2025, 6,965 carry the topic today.

Stars show where developer attention sits. The official reference-server repository has 91,449 and the Python SDK 24,633. Servers from large vendors draw similar interest: Microsoft’s Playwright MCP server, which lets an agent drive a web browser, has 38,472 stars and GitHub’s own MCP server 33,828.

Client and Platform Support

OpenAI, Google and Microsoft all added MCP support during 2025. Anthropic launched the protocol in November 2024; the first announcements listed below from GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI and Google date from April to June 2025, and in December 2025 Anthropic named ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Visual Studio Code among the products that had adopted it.

2026 has been about scale rather than first support. Google offers more than 50 managed MCP servers for its cloud services, and the Claude marketplace lists 995 connectors, up from more than 75 in December 2025. For how MCP fits alongside agent-to-agent standards, see our AI agent protocol ecosystem map.

Governance and Community

Anthropic donated MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund under the Linux Foundation, on December 9, 2025. The launch release named 49 members, including eight platinum members: Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. The foundation’s members page showed 286 organisations on October 21, 2026, and it now hosts six projects, among them the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol.

The MCP project rates its official SDKs by tier. Six of the ten are Tier 1, which requires a 100% pass rate on the project’s conformance tests and fixes for critical bugs within seven days. For what that means when choosing an SDK, see our note on what Tier 1 means for an MCP SDK.

Protocol Versions and Transports

The specification has had four revisions since the launch version of November 2024. The current one, 2026-07-28, removes the initialization handshake and protocol-level sessions, so any request can reach any server instance behind an ordinary load balancer, and it replaces server-initiated requests with Multi Round-Trip Requests. It also deprecates Roots, Sampling, Logging and Dynamic Client Registration, which keep working until at least July 2027 under a new twelve-month deprecation policy.

The standard transports are unchanged: stdio for local servers and Streamable HTTP for remote ones. HTTP+SSE has been deprecated since March 2025, yet 1,077 active registry servers still offer an SSE endpoint. For a migration checklist, see our guide to MCP’s stateless July 2026 release.

Enterprise Adoption: What the Survey Data Shows

Survey data on MCP use inside companies is thin. The most detailed public source is Stacklok’s survey of 300 senior technology leaders at large enterprises, run in December 2025 with 100 respondents each from software, financial services and retail, most of them based in the United States. Across all three industries, 41% said their organisation ran MCP servers in limited or broad production. Among software companies the figure was 45%, with 19% in broad production.

Security was the most-cited obstacle among software respondents (64%), ahead of cost (40%). Stacklok sells an MCP platform, and its samples are small and limited to large companies, so treat these figures as a benchmark for large software organisations rather than a market-wide adoption rate.

Security: Vulnerabilities and Research

Published vulnerabilities have grown with adoption. The National Vulnerability Database held 382 CVE records mentioning “Model Context Protocol” or “MCP server” on October 21, 2026, 324 of them published in 2026. They include flaws in the project’s own tools, such as remote code execution in the MCP Inspector (CVE-2025-49596), and in third-party servers such as Context7 (CVE-2026-75130).

Academic measurements use different samples and methods, so their percentages should not be compared directly. A static analysis of 1,899 open-source servers found tool poisoning in 5.5%; a 2026 study of 64,611 servers found that automated scanners flag most servers as risky but that fewer than half of sampled alerts held up on manual review. For a dated list of incidents, see our MCP security incident ledger.

What It Means for Marketing Teams

There is no public count of marketing teams using MCP, and none of the sources checked for this page publishes deployment numbers for individual marketing MCP servers. What can be measured is supply. On October 21, 2026, 16 active servers in the official registry mentioned HubSpot, 128 mentioned Shopify and 93 mentioned Google Ads. These counts include community-built servers as well as official ones, so they show where developers are building, not which servers are safe to connect.

For marketing operations, a sensible starting point is read-only access to reporting, documentation and CRM data, with campaign launches, budget changes and CRM updates kept behind human approval. See our roundup of official ads MCP servers from Meta, Google and TikTok and our CRM automation services.

Where MCP Goes Next

The MCP project’s August 2026 roadmap sets five priority areas for the next specification release and beyond, among them agent identity and enterprise-ready security; work on agentic messaging includes server-initiated events, so that clients are not left polling for results. The official registry is still in preview, with general availability planned but not dated.

Forecasts of MCP adoption are not measurements. Our six-month MCP adoption forecast and Q3 2026 projection set out scenarios; check any forecast figure against the measured counts on this page before relying on it.

Widely Quoted MCP Figures, Checked

Several MCP statistics circulate without a source, or with a source that says something different. Each one below is checked against the publisher’s own page or data.

Sources

Every figure on this page comes from one of the sources below.