What is Dynamic Client Registration?
Dynamic Client Registration (DCR) is the OAuth mechanism that lets an MCP client register itself with a server's authorization server at runtime, so users do not have to manually create client credentials.
Dynamic Client Registration, defined in OAuth 2.0 RFC 7591 and adopted by the MCP authorization spec, solves a practical onboarding problem. Normally an OAuth client must be pre-registered with the authorization server to obtain a client ID, but in the MCP world any of dozens of hosts might connect to any of thousands of servers, and asking every user to hand-create credentials for each pairing would be untenable. With DCR, when an MCP client meets a server it has never seen, it programmatically POSTs its metadata to the server's registration endpoint and receives back a client ID (and optionally a secret) on the spot. Combined with authorization-server metadata discovery, this lets a host connect to a brand-new remote MCP server with nothing but its URL: discover the endpoints, register automatically, then run the normal OAuth flow. DCR is what makes the just-paste-a-URL experience of remote MCP servers feel seamless rather than requiring a developer-console detour for every integration.