Scan of 20 popular MCP servers: steering text in tool descriptions and stalled spec migration

Pennyforge analyzed 20 of the most popular MCP servers and found 41 instruction-pattern matches in tool descriptions, including at major official repositories. Ten weeks after the breaking MCP spec revision of July 28, 2026, none of the 20 repos had migrated to the new protocol.

• 41 instruction-pattern matches found across 8 of 20 repositories
• 0 of 20 repos migrated to the July 28, 2026 MCP spec
• The 91.1k-star official modelcontextprotocol/servers repo is still old-spec
• Two of the original top-20 servers were already 404s: fetch-mcp and puppeteer-mcp