When Agents Act on Web3: An Attack-Surface Survey of MCP, Skills, and Tool Calling

The paper surveys the growing use of AI agents that modify external state via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem, noting an increase from 27% to 65% of tool use. It argues that when such agents operate on public blockchains, the blockchain execution layer’s properties—irreversibility, signing authority, continuous autonomy, and sequence-level composition—reshape the threat model, making failures irreversible. The authors organize existing MCP-security literature into an attack-surface taxonomy, present a Web3 risk-mapping matrix linking attack classes to amplified impacts and mitigations, and conclude that current defenses are inadequate, stopping fewer than 30% of attacks and less than 3% of model-level safety failures. whyItMatters":"The study highlights that AI agents acting on Web3 introduce irreversible risks that conventional software security cannot address, underscoring the need for stronger, blockchain-aware safeguards."

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• agents
• safety