You added an MCP server to your AI assistant. Did you check what it can touch?

You added an MCP server to your AI assistant. Did you check what it can touch?

MCP servers give your AI assistant new abilities: read your filesystem, query your database, call an API, run a shell command. That is the whole point of them. It is also the whole point of the risk.

The permission question nobody asks

When you install a normal browser extension, you at least see a permission prompt. When you add an MCP server to your AI coding assistant, you usually do not. You add a config entry, restart, and the assistant now has whatever access that server exposes. Most people never read the server's source to see what that actually is.

This matters more with AI-built or AI-suggested MCP servers specifically. If the assistant wrote the server for you, or you copied one from a repo you have not read closely, you have no independent confirmation of what it does versus what its description says it does.