MCP's next spec removes sessions and the handshake most servers were built around

The Model Context Protocol's maintainers froze a release candidate on May 21 for the biggest MCP update since launch, with the finished specification targeted for July 28. The changelog removes sessions and the initialization handshake outright and deprecates three other core features.

That reads as drastic until the actual goal comes into focus: simplification, not a rewrite of what MCP does. The revision hands the jobs sessions and handshakes used to do back to infrastructure that already handles them, moving remote MCP servers closer to plain stateless HTTP instead of a protocol with its own connection-management machinery layered on top.

For anyone running or planning a remote MCP server, that's the operator complaint this update is actually answering: standing up a remote server has meant building and maintaining session-handling machinery an ordinary stateless service was never supposed to need. Once the finished spec ships, expect the setup and hosting side of running an MCP server to get noticeably lighter, and expect servers built against the current session model to need real update work to catch up, not a drop-in swap.