Prose Is a Suggestion. Agent Harnesses Need Cages.

MCP, MCP everywhere, and not an enforcer in sight. The prevailing thesis in 2026 is that enterprise SaaS becomes the backend, and the agent harness (e.g., Claude Cowork) becomes the app. It’s a reasonable bet for a class of productivity work. It’s the wrong bet, or at least a premature one, for any task where getting the steps right matters than producing fluent output. What the courts show about where AI landed first A March 2026 working paper by Anand Shah (MIT) and Joshua Levy (USC) documents AI’s first large-scale effect on a regulated system.