The Model Context Protocol's stateful session model is being dropped entirely, with the 2026-07-28 specification finalizing tomorrow, making MCP stateless at the protocol layer for the first time. The current finalized specification, 2025-11-25, requires every MCP client to open a session with an initialize request before any tool call, and every subsequent request must carry an Mcp-Session-Id header, which pins each client to whichever server instance issued it. The 2026-07-28 specification eliminates both the handshake and the session ID via SEP-2575 and SEP-2567. The protocol version, client identity, and client capabilities now travel in a _meta field on every individual request, and a new server/discover method lets clients fetch server capabilities on demand. This allows any MCP request to land on any server instance, enabling a remote server to run behind a plain round-robin load balancer. Lead maintainers David Soria Parra and Den Delimar are involved.