csoai/agent-interop-census

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Agent Interop Census

A census, not a scoreboard. 7,645 rows indexing what publicly exists in the agent-interoperability ecosystem: MCP servers in the official registry, Hugging Face Spaces, and open-licence repositories on GitHub.

Zero rows carry a measurement. graded: false and measurement: null on every single row. A grade requires a run against a frozen bank; no run was performed here. Each row states, in the row itself, what it is (an index entry observed in a public registry) and what it never proves (quality, safety, fitness or compliance).

The lid

7,645 rows · 100 MCP registry entries · 6,588 HF Spaces · 0 graded · not a ranking · not a certification.

What is counted

GitHub topic totals (aggregate counts, not per-repo rows), from search/repositories:

topic:mcp-server by licence: mit 16,194 · apache-2.0 2,502 · gpl-3.0 336.

Honest limitations

• —The MCP registry's cursor pagination intermittently stalls. A probe on 2026-09-05 saw pages 5 and 6 return an identical nextCursor and an identical first item. A paginator without loop detection silently re-reads one page and reports an inflated total — this collector does dedup by (name, version) and records why it stopped. Stop reason for this build: cursor exhausted — clean end of registry, after 2 pages.
• —Smithery advertises far more than it will serve. Its API declares totalCount: 14,625 alongside totalPages: 5. At its maximum pageSize of 100 that is 500 rows reachable, and those 500 contain only 272 distinct servers because the pages overlap — a ~43x gap between advertised and enumerable. pageSize=200 and pageSize=1000 return zero servers. totalCount also drifts between consecutive calls, so it is a live estimate, not a count. This dataset therefore carries 272 Smithery rows, not 14,625, and says so.
• —This build's registry enumeration is COMPLETE. mcp_registry_enumeration_complete: true in totals.json. A partial enumeration is a floor, never a total.
• —mcp.so rows come from its published sitemap, so a row means a URL was listed for indexing — not that the listing resolves, and not that a server is reachable.
• —Hugging Face exposes no `x-total-count` and caps pages at 100, so a first page is never a total. Space counts here come from paginating to exhaustion.
• —A 919-page walk of a live registry is a smear, not a snapshot. Publishers push during the enumeration. This build counted 65 rows flagged isLatest against 65 distinct names — the gap is one server that released a new version mid-walk, read as latest on an early page and superseded by a later one. Re-running will not reproduce the same totals to the row, and any collector claiming otherwise is not accounting for this.
• —A search term is not a taxonomy. HF Spaces rows match the string mcp; that is a search result, not a verified capability. exposes_remote_endpoint is null for Spaces because it was not probed.
• —Registry presence is not reachability. 342 registry entries declare a remote endpoint; none was contacted for this census.

Licences, checked rather than assumed

• —punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers is MIT (94k stars). Its entries are included, and every row carries attribution: "curated by punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers (MIT)" because that licence requires it.
• —modelcontextprotocol/servers reads NOASSERTION on GitHub. That is not missing data: the project is mid-transition from MIT to Apache-2.0, per contribution, with documentation under CC-BY-4.0 and un-relicensed contributions still MIT. Calling it "Apache-2.0" would be wrong, so it is described, not simplified.
• —Glama is excluded entirely. Its API returns 401 without a key, and its Data Licence requires visible Glama attribution on every page that displays the data. Not collected.

Licence is the thing absorption actually depends on — and most rows do not state one

Of the 393 Hugging Face models matching mcp, only 154 declare a licence and 239 do not — 60% UNSTATED. Datasets are the other way round: 186 of 292 state one.

That matters more than the row count. "Index every open-licence artefact" sounds like a large population; measured, the majority of the model half cannot be established as open at all. An absent tag is UNSTATED, never "permissive" — and a declared tag is the publisher's own claim, not a legal review. Neither is a grade.

GitHub topics are counts here, not rows — because they cannot be enumerated

topic:mcp-server reports total_count 27,604, and GitHub then says "Only the first 1000 search results are available". Star-bucket slicing does not clear it: stars:0 alone is 11,562. So GitHub appears in this dataset as an aggregate count, never as rows. A number we can derive is not a population we can enumerate, and printing 27,604 rows we never saw would be the same defect as Smithery's 11,664.

Reachability measurement

Not run in this build. reachability_observation is null; the census contains no endpoint liveness claim. Registry presence remains distinct from reachability and conformance.

Who publishes this

Council of AI (CSOAI Ltd, UK Companies House 16939677) — a measurement body. We measure. We never certify. No row here is an endorsement, and nothing in this dataset writes the public GSPC board.

Live board at the time of this build: 22 axes · 22 measured · 0 unmeasured (csoai.gspc-axes/0.5) — re-fetch it, do not quote this line:

curl -s https://councilof.ai/api/gspc | python3 -c "import json,sys;print(json.load(sys.stdin)['totals'])"

The live MCP endpoint carries ? tools over HTTP.

Verify

• —Board: <https://councilof.ai/api/gspc>
• —Public root: <https://councilof.ai/root.json>
• —Verify a card: <https://councilof.ai/gspc-verify>
• —Corrections ledger: <https://councilof.ai/api/corrections>
• —Org index: <https://huggingface.co/csoai>

manifest.json carries a sha256 for every file in this repo; totals.json carries every figure above, derived at build time.

Citation

@dataset{csoai_agent_interop_census_2026,
  title  = {Agent Interop Census: MCP servers, Hugging Face Spaces, and open-licence repositories},
  author = {{Council of AI}},
  year   = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/csoai/agent-interop-census},
  note   = {Census only; zero rows carry a measurement. CC-BY-4.0.}
}

Attribute as: Council of AI, CSOAI Ltd 16939677, councilof.ai. Licensed CC-BY-4.0.

Built 2026-09-14T10:48:11Z.

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