The emergence of MCP (Model Context Protocol) marks a major milestone for the AI ecosystem. For the first time, the industry is converging around a shared interface for tool interaction—standardizing how models discover tools, invoke capabilities, exchange context, and communicate with external systems.
But MCP also reveals a larger architectural gap: it solves the protocol problem, not the runtime problem. And the runtime problem is becoming increasingly critical.
Protocols Are Not Runtimes
MCP standardizes communication—defining tool discovery, invocation, and resource management. This is valuable. But protocols only define "how systems communicate," not "how systems safely execute."
To analogize: HTTP standardized web communication, but it didn't solve application isolation, runtime governance, resource scheduling, or execution security. Those are the responsibilities of operating systems and runtimes.
