The claim that MCP reached a release candidate is not confirmed by the primary source
This item was built on secondhand reports from August. Checking the specification shows that Model Context Protocol has no release candidate stage at all: versions carry dates, revisions are marked draft, current or final, and the current one is 2026-07-28. What holds is the rest of it, that MCP is the layer everything an agent touches passes through and gets approved by.
Source
Connect Claude Code to tools via MCPClaude Code official documentation · Original published August 1, 2026
Model Context Protocol is the open standard through which agents connect to business systems. On August 1 this page reported, on secondhand accounts, that the standard had reached a major release candidate. Checking the specification does not confirm that claim, so it is withdrawn here.
How MCP is actually versioned
The specification uses dated version labels, in the form year-month-day, and they record when backwards-incompatible changes were last made. The version is not raised while the changes stay backwards compatible.
Revisions are marked draft, current or final. A draft is not ready for use, the current one is in use and can still take compatible changes, and a final one is closed. There is no release candidate stage in that scheme, and the current version of the protocol is 2026-07-28.
What still holds
When an agent needs to read from an issue tracker, write to a database, or call an internal service, something has to admit and approve every one of those calls. MCP is that layer, and it is increasingly treated as a security boundary rather than a convenient way to connect tools.
For the contents and the label of any given version, the official specification is the authority, not reports on a news site.
Sources
Corrections
An earlier version said, on secondhand reports, that Model Context Protocol had entered a major release candidate stage. Checking the specification does not confirm that: MCP is versioned by date, its revisions are marked draft, current or final, and there is no release candidate stage in that scheme. The current version of the protocol is 2026-07-28. The claim is withdrawn and the text is reduced to what the source confirms.
Related
OpenClaw 2026.10.2 stops long tool output from slipping credentials past redaction
A bug in OpenClaw's secret masking let a credential through whenever it straddled the boundary between two slices of a long text. The fix ships in 2026.10.2 along with repaired updates from 2026.10.1 and a new compaction default for OpenAI and Anthropic API keys.
OpenClawverified
OpenClaw 2026.10.1 lets agents search installed skills and changes how sessions message each other
OpenClaw released version 2026.10.1 on October 10, 2026, its first stable release since 2026.9.7. Agents can now search the skills installed on a machine and read only the one a task needs, instead of carrying the whole library in the prompt. Opt-in MCP Apps run beside chat, and full backups can go to an external drive or Cloudflare R2. Three changes can break existing setups: session-to-session messaging, the old required argument, and Workboard data stored before July 2026.
OpenClawverified
Claude Code 2.1.294 fixes prompt hooks that let through the actions they were written to block
Anthropic released Claude Code 2.1.294 on October 8, 2026. It fixes prompt and agent hooks phrased as instructions, which could allow exactly the actions they were meant to stop. Version 2.1.295 followed the same day with an onFailure setting that makes a crashed or timed-out command or HTTP hook block the action. Releases 2.1.292 and 2.1.293 from earlier in the week closed several permission and sandbox gaps.
Claude Code Releases (GitHub)verified