Stateful MCP client capabilities on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime now enable interactive, multi-turn agent workflows that were previously impossible with stateless implementations. Developers building AI agents often struggle when their workflows must pause mid-execution to ask users for clarification, request large language model (LLM)-generated content, or provide real-time progress updates during long-running operations, stateless MCP servers can’t handle these scenarios. This solves these limitations by introducing three client capabilities from the MCP specification:

These capabilities transform one-way tool execution into bidirectional conversations between your MCP server and clients.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard defining how LLM applications connect with external tools and data sources. The specification defines server capabilities (tools, prompts, and resources that servers expose) and client capabilities (features clients offer back to servers). While our previous release focused on hosting stateless MCP servers on AgentCore Runtime, this new capability completes the bidirectional protocol implementation. Clients connecting to AgentCore-hosted MCP servers can now respond to server-initiated requests. In this post, you will learn how to build stateful MCP servers that request user input during execution, invoke LLM sampling for dynamic content generation, and stream progress updates for long-running tasks. You will see code examples for each capability and deploy a working stateful MCP server to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime.

The original MCP server support on AgentCore used stateless mode: each incoming HTTP request was independent, with no shared context between calls. This model is straightforward to deploy and reason about, and it works well for tool servers that receive inputs and return outputs. However, it has a fundamental constraint. The server can’t maintain a conversation thread across requests, ask the user for clarification in the middle of a tool call, or report progress back to the client as work happens.

Stateful mode removes that constraint. When you run your MCP server with stateless_http=False, AgentCore Runtime provisions a dedicated microVM for each user session. The microVM persists for the session’s lifetime (up to 8 hours, or 15 minutes of inactivity per idleRuntimeSessionTimeout setting), with CPU, memory, and filesystem isolation between sessions. The protocol maintains continuity through a Mcp-Session-Id header: the server returns this identifier during the initialize handshake, and the client includes it in every subsequent request to route back to the same session.

When a session expires or the server is restarted, subsequent requests with the early session ID return a 404. At that point, clients must re-initialize the connection to obtain a new session ID and start a fresh session.The configuration change to enable stateful mode is a single flag in your server startup: