MCP Publishes a New Roadmap: Sessions and the Init Handshake Are Already Gone, Next Up Is Agent Identity and Webhook-Style Server Events
MCP lead maintainers David Soria Parra and Den Delimarsky published an updated protocol roadmap on August 22 organized into five priority areas: agentic messaging primitives, HTTP-native transport unification, agent identity and enterprise security, improved primitives, and SDK developer experience. The retrospective is the more actionable half: the 2026-07-28 spec release removed protocol-level sessions and the initialization handshake entirely (SEP-2575, SEP-2567) so servers scale horizontally without holding state, added server/discover for capability negotiation before any other call, made list results cacheable (SEP-2549), moved Tasks into an official extension (SEP-2663), and replaced server-initiated requests with Multi Round-Trip Requests (SEP-2322) so elicitation works on stateless servers. Anyone running an MCP server built against the pre-July spec is now on a deprecated shape, and the next cycle adds server-initiated webhooks and channels plus Client ID Metadata Documents as the preferred client registration path.
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