Why use MCP when Agents can use APIs directly?

Reddit r/AI_Agents 08/28/26, 11:17 AM News

Summary

The article questions the redundancy of MCP in agentic workflows when AI agents can directly call APIs, noting MCP's value in consensus and governance but suggesting it might be unnecessary for web API-based implementations.

[Sorry in advance if this a duplicate of another post, but feels like the response to this question can vary every month] Agentic workflows and LLMs are now powerful enough to call and discover APIs and CLIs directly, so MCP feels more and more like a heavy redundancy. Feels like the biggest value MCP now represents is the consensus around it: since it was accepted by everybody, AI clients, SaaS tools and all kind of solutions build permissions and AI governance layers around it. But couldn't we do it around APIs directly? Disclaimer: I am mainly referring to MCPs built on top of Web APIs, since I've spent the last months building MCPs basically replicating existing SaaS APIs. Of course, MCP providing local or additional capacities not supposed to be included in public or private APIs are a different case.

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