MCP still isn't dead
6 months ago, the internet buried MCP.
Garry Tan tweeted "MCP sucks honestly." Pieter Levels called it useless. "MCP is dead, long live the CLI" hit the top of Hacker News. The hottest open-source agent project on GitHub refused to support it.
I wrote at the time that MCP was quietly turning into boring infrastructure, and that boring was the whole point. A few people told me I was coping.
Last month the spec shipped the most boring update imaginable, and it made my case for me.
The MCP 2026-07-28 release candidate locked on May 21, hailed as the biggest revision since launch. And the marquee features are a stateless protocol core and a formal deprecation policy.
A deprecation policy. You only write one of those for software people plan to depend on for the next decade.
And the stateless part matters more than it sounds. A remote MCP server that used to need sticky sessions and a shared session store now runs behind a plain round-robin load balancer. That's the least exciting sentence you can write about a protocol, but it's exactly what you need to run agents across a company.
The auth everyone called clunky got tightened up: aligned with OAuth and OpenID Connect, hardened for real SSO deployments.
The ownership changed too. Anthropic donated MCP to the Linux Foundation back in December, with OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft as co-sponsors. It's not one company's protocol anymore.
The numbers kept climbing. An independent census counted 17,468 servers in Q1. Anthropic reported over 10,000 active public servers at the donation. 97 million monthly SDK downloads.
Here's my favorite tell: RSA Conference 2026 was flooded with MCP talks, and fewer than 4% were about the upside. One session walked through an MCP bug that chained into remote code execution and a full Azure tenant takeover.
Nobody red-teams a toy. You only attack something if it actually matters.
6 months ago the MCP conversation was viral tweets. Now it's SEP review bottlenecks, contributor ladders, and session-management tiers. The arguments got smaller and more procedural, which is what happens when something stops being a debate and becomes a dependency.