# MCP adds long-running tasks and formal governance

> The November 2025 MCP revision adds experimental support for long-running tasks, OpenID Connect discovery and finer-grained consent, and sets out formal project governance.

By Matt O'Donnell. Published November 26, 2025.  
Tags: mcp, standards.  
Canonical: https://kenseme.com/blog/mcp-spec-november-2025-tasks/

The Model Context Protocol published its third specification revision of 2025 on November 25.

## What changed

1. **Tasks (experimental).** A client can start a long-running call and check back on it later, instead of holding a connection open while a large query runs.
2. **Identity.** OpenID Connect discovery and Client ID Metadata Documents make it easier for a server to know which client is calling.
3. **Consent.** URL-mode elicitation and incremental scope consent let a server ask for more permission only when it needs it.
4. **Governance.** The project now has a formal governance model and tiers for its official SDKs.

## Why it matters

Long-running tasks are a sign of what people are now asking agents to do. A question like "which suppliers missed delivery targets last quarter and why" is not a single lookup. It is a set of queries across systems, and it takes time.

The longer and more complex the work, the more each step depends on the agent knowing what the data means. A wrong assumption in the first query gets carried through every step after it. The protocol is now ready for that kind of work. The definitions it depends on are the part most companies have not written down yet.

## Sources

1. [MCP specification 2025-11-25, key changes](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/changelog)