Most people ask whether an MCP server is popular. Fewer ask what its tools are allowed to do once an agent connects.
I read the tool list of every MCP server I could open in the official registry, and counted what the tool descriptions say each tool does. No tool was called, anywhere.
Registry list of 2026-10-27: 51,168 servers. I opened a live, read-only session with 25,335 of them and read the tool lists of 23,655 servers (385,096 tools).
A server is counted under every kind it has a tool of, so the rows overlap and do not add up to 23,655.
| What a tool's description says it does | Servers |
|---|---|
| reads or searches | 20,019 |
| creates or changes data | 6,437 |
| sends messages | 2,696 |
| runs code or commands | 1,540 |
| moves money (payment or financial) | 850 |
| controls a browser or desktop | 481 |
| manages infrastructure | 125 |
Looking at what each server mainly works on instead: 8,710 only answer questions and touch nothing outside themselves, 4,072 work on accounts and data in outside web services, 1,978 on files and code on the machine they run on, and 756 on money, payments or trading.
An agent with a payments tool and a "send message" tool in one session is a different risk from one that only searches. The registry's required fields are a name, a description and a version, so a listing alone does not tell you which of these a server has. Reading the tool list does.
A practical use: before you add a server to an agent, look up which kinds of tool it has, and give the agent only what the task needs.
Each list opens the servers with that kind of tool, each with its source and the date it was read:
Method and corrections: protocolprobe.com/methodology and protocolprobe.com/corrections. The same data is in a free API (no key) and a citable dataset: protocolprobe.com/docs/cite.
I built ProtocolProbe. If a label looks wrong to you, tell me in the comments and I will check it.