MCP's biggest spec rewrite lands 28 July 2026

The Model Context Protocol — the open standard letting AI agents talk to your design and coding tools — just got its biggest rewrite since launch, locked in as the 2026-07-28 spec. If you use Cursor, Claude Code or Figma's MCP server, this reshapes how those tools authenticate and connect.

MCP started as an Anthropic project in November 2024; two years on it backs over 10,000 public servers and sits inside OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and AWS agent stacks. The 2026-07-28 spec overhauls the transport model, hardens authorization, deprecates three older features, and promotes two extensions to first-class status, with a 12-month window before old versions stop working. For designers this isn't abstract — it's the plumbing behind Figma's MCP server and any AI agent you connect to your files. If you rely on these integrations day-to-day, expect a version-bump notice soon. This is adoption territory, not hype: the protocol is already load-bearing infrastructure across the industry, not a niche experiment.

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