The MCP 2026-07-28 Spec Went Final With a Stateless Core, and Anthropic Is Rolling It Into Claude Now
The Model Context Protocol's 2026-07-28 specification was published July 28 after ten weeks of validation from a May 21 release candidate, replacing the bidirectional stateful protocol with a request/response model so servers can deploy on serverless and edge infrastructure. It adds a versioned Extensions framework, header-based routing, cacheable list results, authorization hardening, and a formal deprecation policy, with MCP Apps (server-rendered HTML in sandboxed iframes, templates declared upfront for prefetch and security review) and Tasks (long-running work, contributed by AWS) shipping as extensions rather than core. Anthropic published its Claude adoption post in early August; for builders the practical consequence is that MCP servers stop needing a persistent connection and start looking like ordinary HTTP services.
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