Model Context Protocol

2 releases covered on ThursdAI

July 2026

Model Context Protocol
Also ReleasedOpen weights

MCP 2026-07-28 spec

MCP's biggest update ever: fully stateless core, MCP Apps and Tasks extensions, OAuth 2.1

The 2026-07-28 spec makes MCP fully stateless — no handshakes, no sessions, every request self-describing — enabling serverless deployment behind plain round-robin load balancers (GitHub dropped its Redis session store). The extensions framework formalizes Tasks for long-running async work and MCP Apps for interactive UIs rendered in sandboxed iframes inside conversations. Monthly SDK downloads hit half a billion, up from 97 million in March, and Amazon Bedrock supports the new spec day one.

500M monthly SDK downloads, up from 97M in March

November 2025

Also ReleasedOpen weights

MCP Apps

MCP-UI becomes MCP Apps, an official standard from Anthropic + OpenAI

MCP-UI, created by Ido Salomon and Liad Yosef, was standardized as 'MCP Apps' — an official MCP extension jointly adopted by Anthropic and OpenAI that unifies MCP-UI with what OpenAI called Operator Plugins. Agents can now render full interactive HTML UIs directly inside chat, avoiding iOS-vs-Android style fragmentation with one open standard.