Anthropic Releases Major MCP Update Transitioning to a Stateless Core
Anthropic has released the 2026-07-28 specification for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), marking its largest update by transitioning from a stateful connection model to a completely stateless core. This version removes the initialization handshake and session IDs, allowing requests to be self-contained and independent. This architectural shift enables seamless horizontal scaling and allows MCP to be deployed on serverless architectures like AWS Lambda and Cloudflare Workers. It simplifies LLM integrations with external tools and data sources while strengthening enterprise security through native OAuth 2.0 and OIDC support. The update also introduces a versioned extension framework supporting "MCP Apps" and "Tasks" for interactive interfaces and long-running processes without modifying the core protocol. Additionally, it eliminates the need for sticky sessions, allowing requests to be routed to any gateway instance.
## BACKGROUND
Introduced by Anthropic in November 2024, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard designed to unify how Large Language Models (LLMs) communicate with external data sources and development tools. Previously, maintaining stateful connections required servers to store session data in memory or databases like Redis, which limited scalability.