GoKawiilSince our last November release MCP continued to grow at an astonishing rate. Across our Tier 1 SDKs, we’re seeing close to half-a-billion downloads a month, with both TypeScript and Python SDKs crossing the 1 billion total downloads threshold. In just a few months, the protocol continued to grow as the data and interactivity substrate for agentic workflows.
Today, we’re officially pushing the release button on the next version of the MCP specification, 2026-07-28 , along with the SDKs that will allow you to start building clients and servers right away.
The highlight of this release is a stateless protocol core - MCP is transforming from a bidirectional stateful protocol into a request/response stateless protocol. It was one of the most highly-requested features from developers who were eager to get better reliability and scalability for their MCP servers.
A short demo of the stateless protocol core in action.
There is, of course, more to what we’re introducing with this version:
Every request is self-describing, with an optional discovery call for clients that want capabilities up front, so any request can land on any instance behind a plain round-robin load balancer.
Method and tool names travel in the Mcp-Method and Mcp-Name HTTP headers, so gateways can route and authorize on headers directly.
and HTTP headers, so gateways can route and authorize on headers directly. Server-to-client requests for things like sampling and elicitation are being redesigned to use Multi Round-Trip Requests (MRTR), removing the need for constantly open bidirectional streams.
List responses carry cache hints and a deterministic order, so clients can cache tool catalogs and keep upstream prompt caches stable across reconnects.
Formally locking in on a proper extensions framework, with Tasks joining other extensions, such as MCP Apps and Enterprise Managed Authorization (EMA).
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