The Supply Chain Nobody Mapped
As market surveillance begins, attention turns to the connectors between systems — the MCP supply chain — where most small businesses have no visibility at all.
3 September 2026 — Market surveillance under the EU AI Act is now operating, and the first thing it reveals is how little of the AI estate organisations can actually describe.
The specific focus this week was the connector layer. Model Context Protocol servers — the component that lets an AI assistant reach into your files, your mailbox, your systems of record — have quietly become the most consequential software in the stack. They are also the least reviewed. A small business may have spent weeks choosing a model and no time at all auditing the twelve connectors that give it access to everything.
That inversion is the risk. A model that cannot reach your data is harmless. A connector with broad scope turns an ordinary assistant into a privileged operator, and connectors are frequently installed by whoever was setting up the trial.
Hardening guidance published this week pointed at three controls worth adopting regardless of vendor advice: pin connector versions rather than accepting automatic updates, restrict each connector to the narrowest scope that completes its task, and log every call a connector makes so that after-the-fact analysis is possible. None of these requires a security team. All of them require someone to have decided to do it.
Logistics continued to provide the strongest SME returns this cycle — high-volume, well-defined process flow, with a cost-per-shipment baseline already in place.
What this means if you run an SME. Open the settings of whatever AI assistant your business uses and count the integrations. Ask, for each one, whether it needs write access, and whether anyone would notice if it were misused. The connectors are where your permissions live, and until you have looked, you do not know what you have granted.
Mid-week review, in parallel with the Monday series.