MCP 2026-07-28 Goes Stateless, But Agent Workflows Still Require State Management

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The Model Context Protocol (MCP) released its stable 2026-07-28 revision, introducing a stateless, sessionless core designed to work seamlessly with standard HTTP infrastructure, load balancers, and gateways. The update removes the earlier initialization handshake and protocol-level session, meaning any healthy server instance can now handle a request without session affinity. When workflows require state across multiple calls, servers can return explicit handles such as a basket_id or job_id, making state visible as application data rather than hidden transport state. New extensions — MCP Apps and MCP Tasks — add support for interactive interfaces and asynchronous operations with durable handles, expanding MCP's utility beyond short synchronous tool calls. Despite stronger OAuth and OpenID Connect-aligned authorization, the specification makes clear that host applications must still independently manage consent, access controls, and safe execution for agent-driven actions.

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