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jerome3o-anthropic merged 14 commits into from
Jun 30, 2025
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docs(tools): discuss tool name conflicts and how to resolve them #701

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docs(tools): discuss tool name conflicts and how to resolve them
LucaButBoring Jun 10, 2025
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Merge branch 'main' into docs/tool-name-conflicts
LucaButBoring Jun 10, 2025
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Merge branch 'main' into docs/tool-name-conflicts
LucaButBoring Jun 10, 2025
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docs(tools): suggest using config keys as identifiers for servers for…
LucaButBoring Jun 10, 2025
2fb4b32
docs(tools): expand on unique key for tool disambiguation
LucaButBoring Jun 10, 2025
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Merge branch 'main' into docs/tool-name-conflicts
LucaButBoring Jun 11, 2025
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Merge branch 'main' into docs/tool-name-conflicts
LucaButBoring Jun 12, 2025
e27aae2
Make tool name conflict docs less prescriptive
LucaButBoring Jun 16, 2025
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Merge branch 'main' into docs/tool-name-conflicts
LucaButBoring Jun 16, 2025
07b5087
Add URI approach to tool name conflict strategies
LucaButBoring Jun 18, 2025
040ab9f
Make tool conflict phrasing even less prescriptive
LucaButBoring Jun 18, 2025
3492196
Merge branch 'main' into docs/tool-name-conflicts
LucaButBoring Jun 18, 2025
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Merge branch 'main' into docs/tool-name-conflicts
LucaButBoring Jun 23, 2025
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Merge branch 'main' into docs/tool-name-conflicts
LucaButBoring Jun 25, 2025
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12 changes: 12 additions & 0 deletions docs/docs/concepts/tools.mdx
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Expand Up @@ -213,6 +213,18 @@ When implementing tools:
9. Consider rate limiting for resource-intensive operations
10. Log tool usage for debugging and monitoring

### Tool name conflicts

MCP client applications and MCP server proxies may encounter tool name conflicts when building their own tool lists. For example, two connected MCP servers `web1` and `web2` may both expose a tool named `search_web`.

Applications may disambiguiate tools with one of the following strategies (among others; not an exhaustive list):

- Concatenating a unique, user-defined server name with the tool name, e.g. `web1___search_web` and `web2___search_web`. This strategy may be preferable when unique server names are already provided by the user in a configuration file.
- Generating a random prefix for the tool name, e.g. `jrwxs___search_web` and `6cq52___search_web`. This strategy may be preferable in server proxies where user-defined unique names are not available.
- Using the server URI as a prefix for the tool name, e.g. `web1.example.com:search_web` and `web2.example.com:search_web`. This strategy may be suitable when working with remote MCP servers.

Note that the server-provided name from the initialization flow is not guaranteed to be unique and is not generally suitable for disambiguation purposes.

## Security considerations

When exposing tools:
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