Claude Adopts Overhauled MCP Spec With a Stateless Core and OAuth Support

09:45 · July 29, 2026

The Model Context Protocol, the open standard Anthropic introduced for connecting AI models to external tools and data sources, got its biggest overhaul yet with the finalized 2026-07-28 specification, and Claude is now rolling out support for it. The headline change is a move from a bidirectional, stateful connection model to a stateless request and response model, which means MCP servers can now run on serverless and edge infrastructure instead of requiring a persistent connection to stay alive. The spec also brings proper OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect support, so MCP servers can plug directly into enterprise identity systems such as Microsoft Entra or Okta without the workarounds developers previously had to build. On top of that, MCP Apps and MCP Tasks, previously experimental extensions for building interactive interfaces and handling long-running jobs, now ship under a formal versioned extensions framework, giving developers a defined path to add new capabilities without breaking the core protocol. Anthropic says support is rolling out across Claude’s products over the coming weeks. The change matters less as a consumer-facing feature than as infrastructure: it is meant to make it dramatically easier for enterprises to deploy and scale their own MCP servers behind the tools employees already use.