I'm fuzzy when we're talking about what makes an LLM work best because I'm not really an expert. But, on this question of securing/constraining CLIs and APIs? No. It is not easier to secure an MCP than it is a CLI. Constraining a CLI is a very old problem, one security teams have been solving for at least 2 decades. Securing MCPs is an open problem. I'll take the CLI every time.

You should read the article, it explains very well why that is completely wrong. cLIs don’t have a good story about security, are you serious?? They either use a secret , in which case the LLM will have the exact same permission as you as a user, which is bonkers (not to mention the LLM can leak your secret now to anyone by making a simple curl request) and prevents AI auditing since it’s not the AI that seems to use the secret, it’s just you! And the other alternative is to run OAuth flows by making you authorize in the browser :). That at least allows some sort of auditing since the agent can use a specific OAuth client to authorize you. But now you have no ability to run the agent unattended, you will need to log in to every possible CLI service before you let the agent work, which means your agent is just sitting there with all your access. Ignorance about best security practices really makes this industry a joke. We need zero standing trust. Auditability. Minimum access required for a task. By letting your agent use your CLIs as if it was you, you throw away all of that.