MCP Server Blocked by policy despite being allowed by MCP registry

[chrisnelmes]

Describe the bug

1 MCP server was blocked by policy: 'freshservice-min', this issue appears to have occurred in a release over easter.

mcp-config.json
{
"mcpServers": {
"freshservice-min": {
"type": "http",
"url": "http://localhost:6969/mcp",
"headers": {},
"tools": [
"*"
]
}
}
}

Registry Entry
{
"server": {
"$schema": "https://static.modelcontextprotocol.io/schemas/2025-09-29/server.schema.json",
"name": "freshservice-min",
"description": "Freshservice MCP server for ticket and asset management via the Freshservice REST API.",
"version": "1.0.0",
"remotes": [
{
"type": "http",
"url": "http://localhost:6969/mcp"
}
]
},
"_meta": {
"tools": ["*"]
}
},

MCP server is permitted by the same registry policy in VSCode without issue.

Affected version

No response

Steps to reproduce the behavior

No response

Expected behavior

No response

Additional context

No response

[JoannaaKL]

Hi @chrisnelmes 👋 We recently rolled out the allowlist enforcement in the cli. As described in docs, if the mcp policy is set to registry_only, custom mcp servers will be validated against the registry in settings. For further debugging you can check copilot logs - they include details which registry was checked and what was the result.