Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What changed, and who has work to do The Model Context Protocol specification version 2026-07-28 was finalised on 28 July 2026, following a release candidate. It is the largest structural change the protocol has had. In one sentence: MCP stopped being a bidirectional, stateful protocol and became a request/response, stateless one. Three removals carry most of the consequence. The initialize and initialized handshake is gone (SEP-2575 and SEP-2567). The Mcp-Session-Id header is gone, and with it protocol-level sessions as a concept. In their place, every request self-describes — the protocol version, the client's identity and the client's capabilities all travel inside the request's _meta field, on every single call. The specification blog states the payoff plainly: "Any request can now…
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