The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has released a new specification with a stateless makeover designed for enterprise scale, along with a deprecation policy, aiming to ease widespread deployment.
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<p>This week, the <a href="https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol">Model Context Protocol (MCP)</a>, an open source standard for how AI systems interact with external tools and data sources, saw its largest update since its introduction. Most notably, MCP's protocol core is now stateless, so requests are no longer dependent on a session tied to an individual server instance. This change has the potential to address long-standing barriers to scalability.</p>
<p>The blog post announcing the specification, written by lead maintainers David Soria Parra and Den Delimarsky (who both work at Anthropic), says:</p><p><a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/with-a-stateless-makeover-new-mcp-spec-targets-enterprise-scale/">Read full article</a></p>
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# With a stateless makeover, new MCP spec targets enterprise scale
Source: [https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/with-a-stateless-makeover-new-mcp-spec-targets-enterprise-scale/](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/with-a-stateless-makeover-new-mcp-spec-targets-enterprise-scale/)
The hope is that the changes, detailed in the[protocol’s documentation](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2026-07-28/changelog), will make widespread deployment in an enterprise context much easier\. MCP started as something that simply ran on a local machine, connecting models to local apps, so the new spec is a major rethink of some of its foundations\.
There is also a new deprecation policy that ensures at least 12 months between when a feature’s formal deprecation is enacted and when the feature may actually be removed—with a narrow exception for critical security updates\. This is again in keeping with the general “let’s make this work better at enterprise scale” theme of the new specification\.
MCP is managed by the Agentic AI Foundation \(AAIF\), which sits under the Linux Foundation\. MCP was originally introduced by Anthropic, just shy of two years ago, and Anthropic still has significant influence over its direction\. Nonetheless, it has grown beyond just Anthropic—OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon also contribute to it—and it’s supported by many developer tools and, increasingly, a wide range of software and services used for other knowledge and creative work\.
The buck technically stops with individual maintainers, not any of these companies themselves, but as noted above, some of the principal maintainers currently work at Anthropic\.
The MCP specification release candidate for 2026-07-28 introduces a stateless core, extensions like MCP Apps and Tasks, improved authorization, and a formal deprecation policy, enabling scalable HTTP infrastructure without sticky sessions.
Simon Willison discusses the stateless MCP (MCP 2.0) specification, which simplifies protocol implementations, and introduces his new tools mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp built to leverage it.
MCP has released a new specification version 2026-07-28 that shifts from a bidirectional stateful protocol to a stateless request/response core, improving scalability and reliability. The update includes self-describing requests, server discovery, caching hints, and authorization hardening, with updated SDKs in TypeScript, Python, Go, and C#.
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is getting an update to adopt a stateless approach, eliminating session ID management issues and making it easier to run at scale across multiple servers, which could boost enterprise AI agent adoption.