MCP governance is the control of Model Context Protocol servers and the tools they expose — governing which servers are approved, which identities may discover and invoke which tools, what arguments are permitted, and how every invocation is logged.
What is MCP governance?
The Model Context Protocol standardised how AI clients connect to tools and data, which made integration dramatically easier and made ungoverned connection dramatically easier at the same time. An MCP server is an authorised path into enterprise systems, and a developer can add one in minutes. Governing MCP means maintaining an approved server catalogue, binding tool invocation to the identity and purpose of the requester rather than to a shared service credential, constraining arguments, and producing an audit record for every call.