Google Bets Big on Agents at I/O, Anthropic Locks Down the Software Stack, and the MCP Spec Gets Its Biggest Overhaul
AI is no longer just answering questions. It is running inside production systems, patching real vulnerabilities, and connecting to private networks through open standards.
After a short break to revamp our website, we now return to our regularly scheduled MCP Weekly, covering May 1st to May 24th. So much has happened over this past month! This issue covers Google’s agent push at I/O and Cloud Next, Anthropic’s Claude Managed Agents update and enterprise moves, the largest MCP spec revision since launch, NVIDIA’s first agentic CPU, ServiceNow’s MCP gateway, and a wide set of enterprise deployments.
TL;DR
The MCP spec published its largest revision since launch, introducing stateless operation, a new Extensions framework, and rebuilt authentication aligned with OAuth and OpenID Connect. Anthropic shipped MCP tunnels for private network access and self-hosted sandboxes for on-prem tool execution inside Claude Managed Agents. Google I/O brought Gemini 3.5 Flash, the Antigravity agent platform, and Gemini Spark, a personal background agent for consumers. Anthropic acquired Stainless, the team behind every official Anthropic SDK, directly aiming to strengthen MCP server tooling at the source.
Project Glasswing found over 10,000 high or critical vulnerabilities in open source software in a single month, shifting the security conversation from detection to patch speed. KPMG embedded Claude across 276,000 employees in 138 countries starting with tax and legal workflows. SAP unveiled its Autonomous Enterprise vision with Claude as the primary model across HR, procurement, and supply chain agents. TD Bank cut mortgage pre-adjudication from 15 hours to under 3 minutes in production. ServiceNow’s MCP AI Gateway reached general availability, and NVIDIA delivered its first Vera CPUs purpose-built for agentic AI to Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Oracle.
Major Updates of the Week
Google I/O 2026 and Google Cloud Next 2026
At I/O 2026, Google launched Gemini 3.5 Flash for agentic and coding work, the Antigravity platform for agent development, and Gemini Spark, a personal background agent that runs on your device even when switched off. AI information agents inside Search now synthesise topics continuously without waiting for a query.
Claude Managed Agents: Self-Hosted Sandboxes and MCP Tunnels
Anthropic shipped two updates to Claude Managed Agents that directly address enterprise security requirements. Self-hosted sandboxes, now in public beta, move tool execution inside your own perimeter or with managed providers like Cloudflare, Daytona, Modal, or Vercel. MCP tunnels, now in research preview, let agents reach private MCP servers with one outbound connection, no inbound firewall changes, traffic encrypted end to end.
MCP 2026-07-28 Spec Release Candidate
The MCP project published its release candidate, the largest spec revision since launch. Key changes are a stateless protocol core on ordinary HTTP, a new Extensions framework, rebuilt authentication aligned with OAuth and OpenID Connect, and a formal deprecation policy. The final spec publishes July 28, 2026.
Table 1: Anthropic Updates
| Vendor / Product | Key Action / Feature | Significance |
| Project Glasswing: Initial Update | Anthropic and 50 partners used Claude Mythos Preview to find over 10,000 high or critical vulnerabilities in open source software in one month. Claude Security launched in public beta for Enterprise customers. | The bottleneck has shifted from finding bugs to patching them fast enough. Mythos Preview is the first model to solve both UK AISI cyber ranges end to end. |
| Widening the Conversation on Frontier AI | Structured dialogues with scholars and ethicists from 15 plus groups to inform how Claude’s values are shaped. One experiment with an ethical checkpoint tool showed lower rates of misaligned behaviour in internal evaluations. | Anthropic treating model character formation as a live research problem, with results feeding back into training. |
| KPMG and Anthropic Global Alliance | Claude embedded in KPMG’s Digital Gateway platform for 276,000 employees across 138 countries, starting with tax and legal tools. Claude Cowork and Managed Agents integrated directly into the platform. | One of the largest professional services deployments to date, covering regulated client-facing work at firm-wide scale. |
| Anthropic Acquires Stainless | Stainless, which generated every official Anthropic SDK since launch, joins Anthropic. It builds SDKs, CLIs, and MCP servers across TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, and more. | Strengthens MCP server tooling and SDK quality at the source. Hundreds of companies already rely on Stainless for their own connectors. |
| Claude for Small Business | 15 ready-to-run agentic workflows inside QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, Docusign, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365. Free AI Fluency course and a 10-city US tour accompany the launch. | Targets the 44% of US GDP from small businesses, where AI adoption has consistently lagged behind larger enterprises. |
NVIDIA Vera CPUs and Verified Agent Skills
NVIDIA hand-delivered its first Vera CPUs to Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Oracle, the first purpose-built agentic CPU moving from announcement to production. Vera runs agent sandboxes 50 percent faster than traditional CPUs. NVIDIA also published a verified agent skills programme using the SkillSpector scanner and cryptographic signing to govern what skills agents are permitted to run.
ServiceNow MCP AI Gateway
ServiceNow launched the MCP AI Gateway at Knowledge 2026, a central control point for every MCP transaction across agent workflows. Now generally available in every Now Assist and AI Native SKU, with OAuth 2.1 enforced on every connection and the ability to pause any MCP server instantly.
Table 2: Enterprise and Industry Updates
| Vendor / Product | Key Action / Feature | Significance |
| TD Bank Agentic AI for Mortgage Processing | Deployed agents for mortgage pre-adjudication, cutting processing from roughly 15 hours to under 3 minutes per application. | A real production result inside a regulated bank, not a pilot. |
| SAP Sapphire 2026: Autonomous Enterprise | Claude as primary model across Joule agents in HR, procurement, and supply chain. NVIDIA OpenShell provides the secure runtime for Joule Studio. | One of the largest enterprise agent deployments announced to date, anchored in SAP’s existing process and data governance. |
| Alteryx Agent Studio and MCP Server | Agent Studio packages business logic into reusable agents. MCP Server connects them to Slack, Teams, Claude, and OpenAI. Launched at Inspire 2026. | Finance and operations teams can turn existing analytics workflows into agents without writing code. |
| Redis Iris | MCP-native context and memory platform that auto-generates MCP tools from business data models, with real-time ingestion and persistent agent memory. | Removes the manual work of building retrieval and memory layers, with access controls enforced server-side. |
| Camunda ProcessOS | AI-powered agent orchestration for enterprise ERP and CRM using BPMN. Connectors cover ERP, CRM, and major LLM providers over MCP, A2A, and REST. | Brings auditable process control to agent workflows for enterprises moving beyond simple automations. |
| Blue Yonder Model Training Factory | A repeatable system for fine-tuning supply chain agents on NVIDIA Nemotron, starting with warehouse allocation and inventory decisions. Trained on synthetic data only. | Domain-trained intelligence for supply chain, targeting the precision and cost profile that general frontier models cannot match for high-frequency operational decisions. |
| IBM Bob | Reached 80,000 IBM developers with a reported 45% average productivity gain. Covers the full development lifecycle with MCP integration into enterprise tools. | One of the largest internal agent deployments in software development, with productivity numbers reported at real scale. |
| Linux Foundation: AI Security Report | Security readiness is now the top obstacle to AI adoption, ahead of cost, capability, and talent. | Enterprises are not waiting on better models. They are waiting on the infrastructure to trust what agents do. |
| State of AI May 2026 | Four Chinese labs released open-weight coding models in a 12-day window, reaching near-frontier performance on agentic engineering benchmarks at under a third of Claude Opus pricing. | The cost floor for capable agentic coding dropped sharply. High-volume coding agent teams now have a real economic case for open-weight alternatives. |
My Thoughts: Why Agent Infrastructure Suddenly Matters
The Glasswing result is the most important story in this issue, and not for the reason most headlines led with. Finding 10,000 plus critical vulnerabilities in a month is impressive, but the real signal is what happened next: open source maintainers asked Anthropic to slow down because they could not patch fast enough. That is the problem the industry needs to solve now. Detection is no longer the bottleneck. Coordination and remediation speed are. The MCP spec RC is the second story worth sitting with. Stateless operation and rebuilt authentication are not small tweaks. They remove two of the most common reasons enterprise teams have been hesitant to run MCP in production, and they land at exactly the moment when deployments like TD Bank, KPMG, and SAP are proving the protocol works at real scale.If you are building on MCP today, this week has three things worth acting on. First, the spec RC is open for community feedback for ten weeks before it finalises on July 28th. If your implementation relies on stateful sessions or the current auth layer, now is the time to test against the new core before the change is locked in. Second, Anthropic acquiring Stainless means the official SDKs and MCP server tooling are about to get meaningfully better. Worth watching the next few SDK releases closely. Third, self-hosted sandboxes and MCP tunnels are both in public beta now. If your team has been blocked on running Claude agents inside a private network, that blocker is gone.
