MCP Publishes New Roadmap: Agent Identity, Server Events and a Unified Transport
The Model Context Protocol published an updated roadmap on August 22, 2026, naming five priorities led by agent identity, a unified HTTP transport and better tool-call results.
What happened: MCP's maintainers publish a new roadmap
On August 22, 2026, the Model Context Protocol project published its updated roadmap. The authors are the project's lead maintainers, David Soria Parra and Den Delimarsky, who say the plan was shaped with the community of maintainers and working groups and sets the direction for the next specification releases.
Five priority areas
The roadmap names five: agentic messaging primitives, HTTP-native transport unification and hardening, agent identity and enterprise-ready security, improved primitives, and a better SDK developer experience. Several of them — server-initiated events, result types and agent identity — graduated from \"on the horizon\" on the previous roadmap to priorities in their own right.
On identity, the maintainers note that today's MCP authorization assumes a person approving access in a browser, while more and more callers are cloud workloads acting for an absent user or delegating narrower authority to sub-agents. The goal is a standard way to trust agent identities, built on DPoP, Workload Identity Federation and existing OAuth standards — not pasted API keys and long-lived tokens.
What changes for developers
Tool calls will get one clear result contract, and a progressive-discovery effort aims to stop large servers from paying for a hundred tools before the first question is asked. SEPs inside these areas now get expedited review.