MCP Census Verdict Triage Ladder

Treat MCP Census's four verdicts as a routing ladder rather than a binary gate. PASS servers go straight into a client agent stack (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code) with the stamped evidence artifact filed in the delivery pack. REVIEW entries get a manual read of the reasons before anyone installs. BLOCK entries are removed from the .mcp.json and logged as a finding the client can see. UNKNOWN is the expensive rung: it means public evidence was thin, so an agency must either substitute a verifiable server or scope a manual review into the retainer. The economics matter here. The free tier's 1,000 credits each UTC month and the $19 builder tier's 2,000 credits cover most single-client audits, so the ladder costs almost nothing to run. What it protects is margin: one BLOCK caught before go-live is cheaper than an incident call after handover.