Every "MCP server" explainer published before mid-2026 is describing a protocol that no longer exists. MCP went stateless in spec version 2026-07-28. If a post you're reading talks about persistent sessions, it's already wrong.
An MCP server is a program that exposes tools, resources, and prompts to an AI app over JSON-RPC 2.0 — the app asks what the server can do, then calls it. No custom plugin format per AI tool, no hundred bespoke connectors for ten apps and ten data sources. One server, many clients. The comparison that actually lands: MCP is a USB-C port for AI models. Plug in, the device describes itself, done.
Under the stateless spec, every request carries its own version and capabilities in a _meta field. The server infers nothing from what came before. That's not a spec footnote — it's why a server can now run as a plain serverless function instead of holding a session open somewhere. There's also a new required server/discover call, and tool/resource lists can now carry a ttlMs so a client isn't re-fetching the same schema every turn.
The growth numbers are the part that gets skipped in most write-ups: over 97 million monthly SDK downloads and roughly 10,000 live servers, one year after launch. Anthropic donated the protocol to the Agentic AI Foundation in December 2025, co-founding it with Block and OpenAI, under the Linux Foundation, backed by Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Cloudflare. A neutral steward matters when you're deciding what to build a company's tooling on top of.
The part most guides still get wrong isn't the protocol history, it's the security assumption. A tool's description is just text the model reads — so a malicious server can hide instructions inside that blurb. OWASP tracks this as its own attack category: tool poisoning. Treat a third-party MCP server exactly like any other dependency with write access: read what it exposes, check who ships it, scope the token to the least it needs.
For a CMS specifically, this is where it gets useful rather than theoretical — an agent that reads your schema up front doesn't have to guess field types, and one where writes only ever produce a draft can't ship to your live site by accident.
Full breakdown — the three MCP primitives, stdio vs Streamable HTTP, and why MCP usually wraps a REST API instead of replacing it: https://draftbase.co/mcp/guide/what-is-an-mcp-server
More on this in r/draftbase_cms: https://reddit.com/r/draftbase_cms
Draftbase's Hobby plan is free, Startup is $49/mo, both with the same 26-tool MCP server.
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