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> I think the opposite, MCP is destined to fail for the exact same reason the semantic web failed, nobody makes money when things aren't locked down.

Is there a way to handle "locking down" things with MCP? It seems like a potential opportunity for freemium services if they have a mechanism for authentication and telling the MCP caller "this user has access to these tools, but not _these_ yet".

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Yes. MCP allows (and uses) exactly the same authentication mechanisms that any other rest or similar api allows. So if you have a service you want to expose (or not) via MCP you can do that in exactly the same way as you currently could do that for a rest API.

The difference for the user is instead of them having to make (or use) a special-purpose client to call your rest api, the llm (or llm powered application) can just call the api for them, meaning your rest service can be integrated into other llm-powered workflows.

Does it though? How do you provide a login or bearer token or whatever for the LLM to use?

The llm/or llm powered application is just running the mcp server from the file system so you can use your normal methods ie inject it into the environment, pass it somewhere as a parameter or whatever

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