Stateless MCP With Compatible AI Gateways

With the stateless MCP spec now officially out as of July 28th, 2026, there are now two methods of connecting to and configuring an MCP Server. In this blog post, you'll learn what the stateless MCP spec means for the future, the breakdown of the spec, and how to implement it. 💡I wrote a "engineering details quickstart" for some of the other changes that came with the new spec as well, which you can find here. Stateless MCP Breakdown Two of the key changes in the 2026-07-28 change: removal of initialization handshakes and session IDs. An initialization handshake was the startup exchange used by MCP versions through 2025-11-25. Client sends an initialize request containing its protocol version, capabilities, and client information. Server returns an InitializeResult with the negotiated version, server capabilities, and server information. It could also return MCP-Session-Id Client sends notifications/initialized. Normal MCP requests begin. It established what features both sides supported before tools or resources were used. In MCP 2026-07-28 , this handshake was removed. Each request instead carries its protocol version and client metadata, making requests independently processable and stateless. Session IDs were also removed, as anything with a session ID is stateful, since that ID serves as a lookup key for data stored on a server or in a database. Example: If you log into Gmail and look at the devices that are logged into Gmail (your phone, laptop, etc.), the reason you don't need to continuously log into them/daily login is that a session exists for that device. Headers and Body Some headers must be in the body, and some headers that aren't. Standard HTTP headers (Content-Type, accept, Content-Length, etc.) don't need to be in the body. MCP headers that mirror requests, however, need to be in both the header and the body. MCP-Protocol-Version Mcp-Method Mcp-Name Mcp-Param-* Notice how in the example below you'll see the name, method, and protocol version are in