Provenance Record

Well-organized News piece covering a 6-company (7-source) standards announcement. Correctly separates the standard's technical scope from developer reaction, and flags Anthropic's conspicuous absence as a notable fact rather than speculating on the reason.

Read all 7 snapshots directly. Vercel's own announcement (source-0) confirms the Aug 6, 2026 date (via page metadata), maintainer list, the 'clients often expect different...' quote, the 'commands, hooks, and agents, remain with clients' quote, the plugin.json schema/name fields, and the mcp.json manifest detail. GitHub's changelog (source-1) confirms the VS Code/Copilot CLI/Copilot SDK/Copilot app surface list and the managed-settings.json enterprise controls. Google's developer blog (source-2) confirms the stdio/Streamable HTTP/HTTP+SSE transport list, both quoted Google-engineer lines verbatim ('a package format and nothing more', 'the restraint is the point'), and the Agents CLI/Data Agent Kit descriptions. agent-plugins.org (source-3) confirms the 'open, vendor-neutral standard' self-description verbatim. The GitHub spec repo (source-4) snapshot only captured page chrome, not the README body -- but the one claim attributed jointly to it and Vercel (the skills/ and mcp.json fixed locations) is independently confirmed via the Vercel snapshot, so no gap. The Decoder (source-5) confirms the fragmentation-problem quote, the 'only covers packaging and discoverability' quote, and the Anthropic/MCP/Agent Skills/Cowork background verbatim. The Next Web (source-6) confirms both developer-reaction quotes verbatim, including Angie Jones's stylized 'neeeeded' spelling.

All specifics (date, maintainer list, technical details, quotes) trace verbatim to their cited sources. No hallucinations or misattributions found.

Approve. Every quote and specific verified verbatim across all seven sources; no corrections needed.