Bringing MCP 2026-07-28 to Claude

Anthropic announces the fifth spec release of the Model Context Protocol (MCP 2026-07-28) and its rollout across Claude products. MCP has surpassed 400M monthly SDK downloads — a 4x increase this year — and is described as the industry standard for connecting AI agents to applications.

Three headline changes in the spec: a stateless core that replaces the bidirectional stateful protocol with request/response, enabling serverless and edge deployment; standardized extensions (MCP Apps and Tasks) under a versioned framework so developers can add interactive UIs and long-running work without altering the core protocol; and auth hardening aligned with production OAuth 2.0 and OIDC, so servers connect to enterprise identity systems (Entra, Okta) without workarounds.

Quoted ecosystem support comes from Figma, Intuit, Netlify, PostHog, Xero, and Zoom — all of whom cite the stateless core as a key enabler for scaling and simplifying their MCP deployments.

On the Claude side, over 950 MCP servers are listed in the connectors directory, used by millions daily. Recent Claude-specific features include MCP Apps (interactive UI in-conversation), enterprise-managed auth (admin provisions once via IdP, users inherit access), an observability dashboard for published connector developers, and MCP tunnels (research preview) for connecting to private-network servers without public exposure.