MCP went stateless. Your agent workflow did not.

MCP 2026-07-28, the latest stable Model Context Protocol revision, brings significant architectural changes to better integrate with standard HTTP infrastructure. Despite being stateless and sessionless, MCP does not eliminate the work performed through it. Prior to this update, each AI host created unique adapters for various tools, databases, developer tools, and business systems, leading to inconsistent connections and challenges in managing schemas, discovery models, authentication flows, error models, and lifecycles.

Key improvements in MCP 2026-07-28 include:

1. A stateless, sessionless core designed for seamless operation on regular HTTP infrastructure, making it more compatible with standard load balancers, gateways, caches, and tracing systems. Stateful aspects, such as workflow persistence, are handled by servers returning explicit handles as normal arguments.

2. Explicit round-trip interactions between server and client, allowing for clear identification of operations requiring additional information. This approach helps maintain transparency in server processing.

3. A first-class extension model enables optional capabilities to evolve independently from the core MCP protocol. Two relevant extensions for agent applications are MCP Apps for interactive interfaces and MCP Tasks for asynchronous operations with durable handles and polling.

4. Enhanced authorization, aligning more closely with OAuth and OpenID Connect deployments. While authentication establishes whether a client can connect to a server, determining specific actions (e.g., sending emails, modifying records) remains the responsibility of host applications, which should still implement consent interfaces, access controls, and safe execution behavior.

Despite being stateless, MCP calls can still be self-contained while the associated work remains durable. For instance, a customer-onboarding workflow may involve research, document generation, CRM updates, email drafts, approvals, and final handoffs. Multiple MCP calls can participate in this process, but the underlying team still needs to track the goal, current status, ownership, documents used, tools available, completed and failed tasks, human input requirements, and supporting evidence for verification.

The distinction between MCP Tasks and product-level tasks is crucial. The MCP extension represents the lifecycle of a protocol operation, while a host application decides how that operation relates to a business goal, owner, policy, review, and result. Context should belong to a boundary such as a project, workspace, customer account, team, or environment, ensuring appropriate information and actions are accessible to agents within that specific scope.