Model Context Protocol (MCP) adopts stateless HTTP in biggest update

On July 28, the maintainers of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) released the 2026‑07‑28 specification, which they described as the most substantial change since the protocol’s launch. The new spec eliminates the initialization handshake and session‑sticky mechanisms, making each request self‑contained and allowing MCP servers to operate as ordinary stateless HTTP services. This enables round‑robin load balancing, autoscaling and standard caching without the need for session affinity.

AgentStatus founder Román Moskalenko highlighted the shift on social media, noting, “MCP just achieved statelessness, the biggest change since launch… modern and legacy protocols will coexist, but the fault rate may rise.” A technical guide was also published, showing how to build an MCP server with the new TypeScript SDK v2, test multi‑round‑trip requests, and deploy the service for free on Cloudflare Workers.

The update also deprecates three long‑standing features, introduces optional server/discover RPC for capability queries, and adds cache‑control fields (ttlMs, cacheScope) to improve tool‑list caching. Developers are encouraged to adopt the new stateless model, which simplifies deployment while requiring explicit handling of state via request parameters.