AGNTCon + MCPCon Japan 2026

The MCP spec is clear about how one client and one server talk to each other. It says much less about what happens when the client is itself a distributed system, serving millions of people across thousands of third-party MCP remote servers.

At Anthropic, we run a proxy between our products and a large, growing set of remote servers. At that scale, we started running into problems the spec doesn't answer.

This talk is about three of them:

- Authentication: How do we make authentication work across servers that all implement it a little differently? How do we keep people connected when connections drop and credentials expire, without making them sign in again?

- Caching: How do we avoid hammering the MCP remote servers, and which caching strategies make that possible?

- Monitoring: How do we monitor a system where the servers vary widely, from stable production ones to unstable ones still in development? When something breaks, how do we tell whether the fault is ours or the server's?