The Model Context Protocol team published an updated roadmap this week, and it's worth reading beyond the headline. The previous roadmap from March targeted four areas: transport evolution, agent communication, governance, and enterprise readiness. They delivered on all four.
The changes landed in the 2026-07-28 spec release — and the biggest one is architectural. "Protocol-level sessions and the initialization handshake are gone, so a server can scale horizontally without holding state."
That's not a minor tweak. That's MCP crossing from "interesting protocol" to "just another HTTP workload you can run anywhere."
server/discover
Five areas, each with dedicated Working Groups:
Agentic messaging primitives — server-initiated events (webhooks and channels, so clients stop polling), plus maturing Tasks into the core spec. The goal: MCP handles long-running agentic loops natively.
HTTP-native transport unification — unify stdio and Streamable HTTP under one transport model. A local MCP server and a cloud-hosted one should behave identically.
Agent identity — this is the one worth watching. Today auth is built around a human approving in a browser. That doesn't work for agent-to-agent calls or unattended cloud workloads. The roadmap targets DPoP, Workload Identity Federation, and standard token exchange — with active engagement in IETF OAuth and WIMSE standards bodies.
Improved primitives — two specific problems: tools/call
responses can carry output in multiple forms with no contract for which one clients use, and large tool catalogs (100+ tools) waste context tokens before a user asks anything. Progressive discovery is the proposed fix.
SDK developer experience — conformance testing, better docs, making it easier to build MCP clients and servers whether you're writing the code yourself or pointing an agent at the libraries.
The full roadmap is at modelcontextprotocol.io/development/roadmap.
✏️ Drafted with KewBot (AI), edited and approved by Drew.