What agent tools say about money
A survey of the official MCP registry, 26.10.2026. Reproducible from the repository.
We read the public description of the first 2 500 servers in the registry and separated the ones that describe a payment, wallet or x402 function.
| Measure | Count |
|---|---|
| Servers in the sample | 2 500 |
| Describe a payment, wallet or x402 function | 72 |
| …mention a budget | 11 |
| …mention a limit or a cap | 0 |
| …mention a kill switch or emergency stop | 0 |
| …describe a per-task budget | 0 |
| …mention a receipt | 2 |
| …mention an audit trail | 0 |
The 2 500 descriptions mention "approval" 65 times and "audit" 26 times overall — but almost none of those are in the payment group. The tools that move money describe what they pay for, not what stops them.
Honest limits
Descriptions are marketing text. Absence of the word "kill switch" does not prove absence of the feature — it proves the vendor does not consider it worth a line, which is itself a signal. The sample is 2 500 of a larger, changing registry; the filter is lexical; we did not call the servers, we read what they publish.
Why publish it
Because the number is checkable. Nine lines of Python over a public API, snapshot date included in the repository — anyone can re-run it and get their own count. If your tool does have limits, write them in the description: buyers cannot see what is not written.
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