MCP maintainers set five priorities: agent identity, HTTP transport, progressive tool discovery
MCP lead maintainers David Soria Parra and Den Delimarsky named five priority areas: agentic messaging beyond request-response, one HTTP-native transport covering local and remote servers, agent identity via DPoP and token exchange, a single contract for tool results plus progressive discovery, and SDK conformance testing. It is direction rather than schedule — no dated milestones, no deprecation timelines — but Specification Enhancement Proposals inside those areas get expedited review, so server authors building on the 2026-07-28 spec now know which work will land.
Source: blog.modelcontextprotocol.io ↗
More and more of the callers are agents running as cloud workloads with their own identity, acting on behalf of a user who isn't present, or delegating narrower authority to sub-agents.
Why this matters
- → Agents now need identity and delegation — foundational for enterprise-safe autonomous workflows
- → HTTP unification simplifies deployment across local and cloud servers
- → Progressive tool discovery cuts model token spend and improves selection quality at scale