Perplexity CTO: We're Moving Away from MCP — Context Overhead and Auth Friction
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) was supposed to be the universal connector for agentic AI — a standard way for agents to call tools without custom glue code. But at Ask 2026, Perplexity CTO Denis Yarats dropped a significant signal: Perplexity is moving away from MCP internally, and the reason has major implications for anyone building production agentic systems. The Problem: 55,000 Tokens Before Your Agent Does Anything Yarats was direct about the technical issue. MCP tool definitions — the schema declarations that tell an agent what tools are available and how to call them — were consuming 55,000+ tokens before a single user message was processed. ...