Anthropic adds Model Context Protocol Tasks and Elicitations to Claude

Anthropic has added support for Tasks and Elicitations from the 2025-11-25 Model Context Protocol (MCP) specification inside Claude. Previously, MCP tool invocations operated primarily as synchronous request-response calls, forcing expensive operations to either hold open a connection or fail when hitting client timeouts.

With MCP Tasks, any request can be augmented with a durable, receiver-generated state machine identified by a unique task ID. Tool authors declare support on each tool definition via the execution.taskSupport property, which accepts required, optional or forbidden. When Claude invokes a task-augmented tool through tasks/requests/tools/call, the MCP server immediately returns a task handle so Claude can poll execution state via tasks/list, cancel running work via tasks/cancel or retrieve the deferred output once computation finishes.

Alongside Tasks, Anthropic enabled MCP Elicitations (tasks/requests/elicitation/create), a protocol primitive that allows an external MCP server or plugin to pause an active workflow and ask the user for structured parameters, disambiguation or explicit confirmation before proceeding with a sensitive action. Both primitives are available to developers building MCP integrations and plugins for Claude.