Agents in Action: What 177,000 MCP Tools Reveal About AI's Shift from Thinking to Doing
A landmark empirical study from the UK’s AI Security Institute — co-authored with the Bank of England — has just published the most rigorous large-scale measurement of AI agent behavior to date. The paper, titled “How are AI agents used? Evidence from 177,000 MCP tools,” analyzed 177,436 Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools created between November 2024 and February 2026. The headline finding: AI agents have decisively crossed from observation to action, and the enterprise security community is not keeping pace. ...