⚠️ Experimental — This repository is an incubation space for the Triggers & Events Working Group. Contents are exploratory and do not represent official MCP specifications or recommendations.
The Triggers & Events Working Group exists to define how MCP servers proactively notify clients of state changes. Today, clients learn about server-side updates by polling or holding an SSE connection open. This WG will specify a standardized callback mechanism — webhooks or similar — that lets servers push notifications when new data is available, with defined ordering guarantees that hold across all transports.
See the full Working Group Charter for scope, authority, and operations.
- Specification work: SEPs defining the trigger/callback mechanism, subscription lifecycle, delivery semantics, and event ordering guarantees
- Reference implementations: SDK components demonstrating server-initiated notifications and client-side callback handling
- Cross-cutting concerns: Coordination with the Transports WG on transport-specific delivery behavior, and with the Agents WG where task completion notifications intersect with event triggers
- Documentation: Specification sections covering event-driven patterns and migration guidance from polling-based approaches
- Changes to the transport wire format or session model (owned by the Transports WG)
- General-purpose pub/sub infrastructure beyond what the MCP protocol requires
- Modifications to existing notification primitives (
notifications/resources/updated,notifications/tools/list_changed, etc.) that do not relate to proactive server-initiated delivery
| Group | Overlap |
|---|---|
| Transports WG | Delivery and ordering guarantees depend on transport capabilities; callback semantics must be coherent across stdio, Streamable HTTP, and future transports |
| Agents WG | SEP-1686 (Tasks) identifies webhook-style task completion notifications as a future consideration; this WG owns that mechanism |
| Role | Name | Organization | GitHub |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lead | Clare Liguori | Amazon Web Services | @clareliguori |
| Lead | Peter Alexander | Anthropic | @pja-ant |
This repository will hold proposals, reference implementations, and experimental findings as the WG's work progresses. See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to participate.