Stateless MCP 2.0 Spec Released, Inspires New Tools by Simon Willison

On July 28, 2026, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) 2.0 specification was released, marking the most significant update to the protocol since its launch. The new stateless design simplifies implementation by eliminating the need for session IDs and server-side state, requiring only a single HTTP request per tool call. This change has reignited interest from developer Simon Willison, who had previously noted that MCP was overshadowed by Anthropic's Skills feature in 2025. Willison argues that MCP tools are easier to audit and control than granting agents arbitrary shell and curl access, making them safer for sensitive applications. To demonstrate the improvements, he built three projects: mcp-explorer, a stateless Python CLI tool for probing MCP servers; datasette-mcp, a Datasette plugin that exposes a /-/mcp endpoint; and llm-mcp-client, an alpha plugin integrating MCP with his LLM tool. The datasette-mcp plugin is live on his blog's mirror at datasette.simonwillison.net/-/mcp, and he has documented how to connect it to ChatGPT and Claude. Willison also revisited his earlier security concerns about prompt injection in MCP, noting that the new stateless approach makes it easier to reason about agent capabilities. He plans to use MCP more in building sensitive LLM applications. The post was published on July 31, 2026, and also references a May 21 blog post introducing the release candidate, and a previous incident involving OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on Hugging Face.