I received the AAIF Outstanding Technical Contribution Award

The Agentic AI Foundation presented its Outstanding Technical Contribution Award to an MCP Python SDK maintainer at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America on the second day of the event, recognizing work that included shipping the SDK's v2 beta alongside the 2026-07-28 revision of the MCP specification. The v2 release, now the stable line, adds a new MCPServer API, multi-round-trip requests, standard error codes, authorization hardening, routable transport headers, a deprecation policy and OpenTelemetry tracing enabled by default; the maintainer also sponsored SEP-1288, the WebSocket transport. The maintainer credited colleague Laís Carvalho for the nomination and employer Pydantic for funding the open-source work, and noted that Vstorm's Antoni Kozelski and Bartosz Gonczarek received the Open Agentic AI Innovation Award at the same event.

Last Friday, on day two of AGNTCon + MCPCon North America https://events.linuxfoundation.org/agntcon-mcpcon-north-america/ , the Agentic AI Foundation https://aaif.io gave me the Outstanding Technical Contribution Award for my work on the MCP Python SDK https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk . You can watch the moment on the day two livestream, right after the opening keynote. I'm one of the two maintainers of the MCP Python SDK. Python developers use it to build MCP servers and clients, and it's where a lot of my time has gone this year. The biggest piece of that work was v2. We shipped the v2 beta https://pydantic.dev/articles/mcp-python-sdk-v2-beta alongside the 2026-07-28 revision of the MCP specification, with a new MCPServer API and multi-round-trip requests. v2 is now the stable release line. A lot of v2 is the new specification, implemented in Python: standard error codes, authorization hardening, routable transport headers, a deprecation policy, and OpenTelemetry tracing on by default. On the specification side, I sponsored SEP-1288 https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol/issues/1288 , the WebSocket transport. The HTTP transport also runs on Starlette https://github.com/Kludex/starlette and Uvicorn https://github.com/Kludex/uvicorn , which I maintain, so when the SDK finds a bug underneath it, I can fix it in the layer where it belongs. Most of that work happens in issues, pull requests, and spec discussions that nobody sees on a conference stage. It's nice to have it noticed. First, a special thank you to my colleague Laís Carvalho https://pydantic.dev/authors/lais-carvalho . She nominated me, and I would not have been on that stage without her. To the MCP maintainers and contributors: the SDK is better because of every issue, review, and pull request you sent. To Pydantic https://pydantic.dev : you pay me to work on open source, and you let me spend that time where the community needs it. That is rarer than it should be. It also goes both ways. I work on Pydantic Logfire https://pydantic.dev/logfire too, so v2 ships an OpenTelemetry middleware enabled by default. Call logfire.configure distributed tracing=True in your MCP server and logfire.configure in your client, and every request between them arrives in Logfire https://pydantic.dev/logfire as one trace. The v2 beta post https://pydantic.dev/articles/mcp-python-sdk-v2-beta walks through it. I also shared the stage with our friends Antoni Kozelski and Bartosz Gonczarek from Vstorm https://vstorm.co/?utm source=pydantic&utm medium=partnership&utm campaign=aaif-outstanding-technical-contribution-award , who won the Open Agentic AI Innovation Award . Congratulations to both of you, and thank you for making the photo a lot better. The Logfire MCP server https://pydantic.dev/docs/logfire/guides/mcp-server/ is where this work lands first. It runs on the same Python SDK, so the standard error codes, the authorization hardening, and the tracing middleware above all show up there before anywhere else. I want it to be the best MCP server you connect your coding agent to, and I spend a lot of my week making that true. If you have a Logfire project, add https://logfire-us.pydantic.dev/mcp or the EU URL to your agent and ask it what broke in production last night. Setup takes a few minutes, and the answer usually takes less. See you at the next MCPCon.