Nine days out, the largest MCP revision ever is locked for July 28
Stateless core, header routing, an extensions framework, hardened OAuth, and a formal deprecation policy. Here is the state of play with the beta SDKs already shipped.
- The largest MCP revision ever publishes as a final spec on July 28, nine days from now, with the release candidate locked since May 21 after a ten-week validation window.
- Beta SDKs shipped June 29 across Python, TypeScript, Go, and C#, and the Enterprise-Managed Authorization extension went stable July 6 with Anthropic, Microsoft, and Okta as adopters.
- Roots, Sampling, and Logging enter formal deprecation but keep working through 2027 under the protocol's first deprecation policy.
The countdown we flagged when the release candidate landed is now inside its final stretch. The Model Context Protocol's 2026-07-28 specification, the largest revision since the protocol launched, publishes as final in nine days, per the maintainers' release notes from lead maintainers David Soria Parra and Den Delimarsky. With the change window closed, here is the desk's status check on what actually ships.
The heart of the revision is statelessness. The initialize handshake and protocol-level sessions are gone, so servers can sit behind ordinary load balancers like any web service, with routing carried on new Mcp-Method and Mcp-Name headers and HTTP-style caching via ttlMs and cacheScope. The spec also moves to JSON Schema 2020-12 and W3C Trace Context.
The ecosystem is already moving
Beta SDKs shipped June 29: Python v2, with FastMCP renamed MCPServer, an ESM-only TypeScript v2 split into separate server and client packages, Go v1.7.0-pre.1, and C# 2.0.0-preview.1. The Enterprise-Managed Authorization extension went stable July 6 with Anthropic, Microsoft, and Okta as adopters and server-side support from Asana, Atlassian, Canva, Figma, Linear, and Supabase, per InfoQ. The formal extensions framework also brings MCP Apps, server-rendered UIs in sandboxed iframes, and a Tasks extension for long-running work.
What breaks, and when
Nothing on July 28, by design. The revision introduces MCP's first formal deprecation policy, under which Roots, Sampling, and Logging remain functional through 2027. That runway matters because the catalog layer keeps growing around the spec, from Microsoft's certification program to JetStream's verified server catalog. A protocol that can be load balanced, cached, and audited is a protocol that procurement can sign off on. That is the real headline nine days out.