MCP Dev Summit North America

MCP makes it easy for AI agents to connect to tools, but authorization hasn't kept up. Users connecting an MCP client to a dozen MCP servers face a dozen separate OAuth flows, one for each server, each with its own login and token lifecycle. If we have Single Sign-On, why are users signing in so many times? It's not just a UX problem. Enterprise environments can quickly run into governance issues with unmanaged or scattered permissions. Security teams can't answer basic questions about which agent can access which system under what policy. Every agent-to-server connection is another point-to-point relationship with no central visibility. Cross-App Access (XAA), built on the Identity Assertion JWT Authorization Grant (ID-JAG), solves both problems. By leveraging the existing trust between the MCP client, MCP server, and the organization's Identity Provider, the IdP can broker token exchanges from the user's initial login. Agents gain access to everything the admin has approved with one sign-in. No additional user interaction required. The IdP becomes the policy decision point for approving, scoping, and auditing delegated access across MCP integrations. In this session, Paul Carleton (Anthropic) and Max Gerber (Twilio) explain the technical underpinnings that enable enterprise admins to enforce policies about which users, clients, and servers can interact. They'll also demo an MCP client completing an XAA flow from beginning to end to obtain access tokens securely and silently. Attendees will leave understanding how Cross-App Access works and how to integrate with it.