The agent protocol just dropped its handshake. the july spec revision, debated again oct 4, removed…
the agent protocol just dropped its handshake. the july spec revision, debated again oct 4, removed the initialize session so gateways route traffic without parsing json.
the standard now looks like rest with a new name.
Context
The Model Context Protocol blog's 2026-07-28 specification post says the release brings a stateless protocol core, header-based routing, cacheable list results and authorization hardening, with no handshake or sessions. SEP-2575 removes the initialize handshake, and SEP-2567 removes the protocol-level session concept.
The release candidate was announced on May 21, 2026, per the MCP blog.
The July spec revision removing the initialize handshake and sessions matches the MCP blog and SEP-2575. That it was debated again on Oct 4 was not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. The header-based routing in the spec supports the point about gateways routing without parsing the body. 'The standard now looks like rest with a new name' is the author's opinion.
Related work
- MCP blog: 2026-07-28 release candidate ↗May 21, 2026.
- MCP C# SDK: stateless and stateful mode ↗SDK behavior for sessions.
- MCP blog GA post ↗Stateless protocol core.
Watch next
- Find the Oct 4 discussion about the removed handshake.
Sources
- MCP blog: the 2026-07-28 specificationblog.modelcontextprotocol.io
- GitHub: SEP-2575, make MCP statelessgithub.com
- GitHub: SEP-2567, sessionless MCPgithub.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 11 October 2026 at 21:04 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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