The final MCP 2026-07-28 specification shipped on schedule as the protocol's largest revision since launch: a stateless core (sessions and handshake removed, header-based routing, cacheable list and resource-read results), a formal extensions framework, authorization hardened toward deployed OAuth/OIDC practice, and a formal deprecation lifecycle — Roots, Sampling, Logging, and DCR carry a minimum twelve-month window, while HTTP+SSE follows its own separately published removal schedule.
The two features our July analysis covered are now formal extensions — and Tasks' redesign (poll-based tasks/get, tasks/update, cooperative tasks/cancel) is an explicit breaking change for anyone who built against the 2025-11-25 experimental API, making Tasks migration this quarter's mandatory line item for the estates that adopted it.
Statelessness relocates state, not risk: applications that need continuity mint explicit handles that travel through model context as ordinary arguments — which can make a handle a capability-like artifact visible in transcripts, and handle governance a new line in the MCP audit.
Tasks formalize the temporal-validity problem: a durable task can outlive the authorization that started it, so per-task identity, mid-task revocation, and task-level budget attribution are the async pattern's recommended hygiene — application-level controls the extension leaves to implementers, and its tasks/cancel is cooperative by design.
Apps put untrusted, server-rendered UI inside trusted client chrome — the security analyses flag user-targeted phishing through trusted AI interfaces as the new abuse avenue — with a mitigating grace: tool calls an app initiates are forwarded as ordinary tools/call requests through the layer a gateway already governs, while app-specific ui/* messages remain host-side traffic the rendering client must control.
This is where TrueFoundry fits, on the migration quarter itself: the gateway is a natural collection point for a spec-version inventory (modern requests carry protocol version and client identity on every call — surfacing those fields is logging and reporting work on top of the documented MCP metrics, not a ready-made dashboard), the single place to implement the client-side auth hardening once for every consumer it fronts, and the layer where Task lifecycles and handle flows can get policy — recommended governance controls layered on TrueFoundry's documented authentication, access control, guardrails, tracing, and metrics.
The deprecation clock is the planning horizon: Roots, Sampling, Logging, and DCR keep working for at least twelve months (eligible for removal no earlier than a revision released on or after July 28, 2027) — almost exactly one enterprise budget cycle — while HTTP+SSE tracks its own removal schedule; the estates that inventory now migrate calmly, and the ones that don't will meet the removals as incidents.
TrueFoundry AI Gateway delivers ~3–4 ms latency, handles 350+ RPS on 1 vCPU, scales horizontally with ease, and is production-ready, while LiteLLM suffers from high latency, struggles beyond moderate RPS, lacks built-in scaling, and is best for light or prototype workloads.