MCP 2026-07-28 Spec Drops Sessions, Splits Into Two Wire Protocols

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The Model Context Protocol's 2026-07-28 specification, finalized on July 28, 2026, is the protocol's largest revision since launch, eliminating session-based handshakes entirely. Every request is now self-contained, carrying protocol version, client info, and capabilities inside a _meta envelope rather than relying on an initialize handshake or Mcp-Session-Id header. The change effectively splits MCP into two distinct wire protocols: a legacy era (up to 2025-11-25) that negotiates sessions, and a modern era (2026-07-28 onward) that is fully stateless. TypeScript support ships as two separate packages — version 1.x for legacy servers and version 2 for the new spec — while features like Roots, Sampling, Logging, and HTTP+SSE are deprecated on a 12-month countdown. The stateless design allows MCP servers to operate behind standard round-robin load balancers without sticky sessions, though a newly identified security risk involves an unsigned requestState blob that passes through the client and is therefore attacker-controlled.

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