overview
What it actually takes to get a remote MCP server accepted into Anthropic's Connectors Directory and OpenAI's Plugins Directory, written while doing it in August 2026.
Both flows are documented, and both have requirements the docs state once and quietly. This is the version I wish I had read first: the requirements that decide most submissions, the two portals step by step, and the things that looked true and were not.
Fork this if you are submitting your own server — the shape holds, only the answers change.
Conventions here: a requirement is something a portal enforces; a decision is a choice with the alternative that lost; a dead-end is a belief that was disproven, kept with its correction so nobody re-derives it; an open-question says what would settle it.