MCP Won. MCP Might Also Be Dead.

Here's a fun paradox: the Model Context Protocol is simultaneously the dominant standard for AI tool integration and a protocol that serious production teams are quietly walking away from. Both of these things are true. At the same time. The numbers say MCP won 97 million monthly SDK downloads. 10,000+ registered servers. OpenAI adopted it. Google adopted it. The Linux Foundation is backing it. Anthropic keeps shipping updates. The MCP 2025-2026 roadmap just dropped with an honest list of known gaps and plans to fix them. By every standard metric, MCP won the standards war. It's the HTTP of AI tool calling. It's done. Except. Perplexity's CTO says it's broken At Ask 2026, Denis Yarats — Perplexity's CTO — laid out the case against MCP in production. The criticism isn't theoretical. It's operational: Context window consumption. Every MCP tool call serializes the full tool schema into the context window. You have 20 tools? That's potentially thousands of tokens just for the tool definiti