The Enterprise-Managed Authorization extension to the Model Context Protocol is now stable, enabling organizations to centrally provision MCP server access through their identity provider so users get connected servers on first login without per-app OAuth.
The Enterprise-Managed Authorization extension is now stable. Organizations can centrally manage authorization for MCP servers and end-users can access all connected MCP servers through a single log in. The extension is being adopted by Anthropic, Microsoft, Okta and a growing number of MCP servers.
The Enterprise-Managed Authorization (EMA) extension is now stable. We’ve heard from the community that authorization and repeated consent prompts from connected MCP servers is one of the biggest pain points when it comes to managing connectivity in enterprise environments. This extension helps address this.
EMA allows organizations to control MCP server access centrally through their trusted identity provider. For end-users, this means a zero-touch setup: the MCP servers they need are connected on first login, with no per-app OAuth and nothing to configure as a one-off.
Per-user auth is high friction#
The standard MCP authorization model was designed to be user-scoped and bound to the traditional interactive auth conventions. While this might work well for more general consumer scenarios where individuals decide what touches their data, this doesn’t quite scale for enterprise deployments:
Every employee has to authorize every server individually : onboarding means manually connecting service after service.
: onboarding means manually connecting service after service. Security teams cannot enforce consistent policy : access is whatever each user authorized, with no central control or audit trail.
: access is whatever each user authorized, with no central control or audit trail. Work and personal accounts blur together: there’s no way to require a corporate identity, so a user can connect a personal account to a work tool.
This combination of factors slows MCP adoption and pushes people toward brittle workarounds. With no universal standard for preserving shared auth state, everyone invents their own bespoke solution. The data and tools are available, but the per-user authorization tax keeps most of them switched off.
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