What You're Installing When You Add an MCP Server

There's a simple question most MCP users can't answer before installing a server: What am I actually installing? When you add an MCP server to your agent, you're not just adding a tool. You're inheriting its code, its dependencies, and its behaviour. In many cases that includes a large and often opaque dependency tree, along with whatever known vulnerabilities exist within it. To better understand this, we ran a large-scale analysis of MCP servers drawn from public registries. This post covers the first two phases of that work: inventory and dependency risk. We're also publishing the results as a public API so anyone can query the data directly. Public API: mistaike.ai/cve-registry — no API key required. Phase 1 — Inventory We began by collecting MCP servers from public registry sources and normalising them into a single dataset. Across sources, this produced a working indexed dataset of over 25,000 distinct MCP implementations drawn from two registries. The goal of Phase 1 was coverag