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As someone who has never used MCP, or allowed an AI to directly talk to APIs, putting something between a model and a service just seems like common sense. If n
by pragma_x 5d ago
As someone who has never used MCP, or allowed an AI to directly talk to APIs, putting something between a model and a service just seems like common sense. If nothing else, it presents an opportunity to tightly control what the AI is allowed to do with external services, especially if the MCP code is outside of the AI's context. I would go as far as to say it's a necessary security measure.
- dominotw 5d agowell if you realease an api you should make sure its usable for ai out of box without 'something in between'. You should always assume ai might be directly calling your api.
- anamexis 5d agoAnd if you don't have a public API, you should always assume AI will be using your UI, reverse engineering your private API, and driving it directly.
- cruffle_duffle 5d agoI absolutely love when they do that unprompted. I once asked a Claude work agent to go pull comparable apartment listings and somehow it’s subagent reverse engineered like rentcafe or whatever’s private API to get the data. All unprompted. So yes. Absolutely assume AI agents acting on behalf of their humans are finding all the token efficient ways to get at your sites data.
- Tractor8626 5d agoAi can't use any api out of box. It requires thing called "harness" to use anything.
- jimbokun 5d agoThe service itself needs to control what the agent can access. Relying on an intermediary to provide access controls, and that agents will never access the service directly, seems dangerous and naive.
- jayd16 5d agoWhat? Why? More is more but you're arguing a security proxy is a dangerous and naive pattern?
- anon84873628 5d agoAnd it's easy for the service to do that by hosting a remote MCP server.
- Tractor8626 5d agoAgent doesn't have api key to access service directly
- ActorNightly 5d agoThe better solution for security is sandbox execution. Most agents used in practice, if given terminal access, can find ways to get around most of the MCP restrictions.