Claude Code adds MCP Tasks and Elicitations for long-running plugin jobs

On 23 October 2026 Anthropic's ClaudeDevs account announced support for two parts of the Model Context Protocol in Claude: Tasks and Elicitations. Both are available now in the Claude Code CLI and are rolling out to more Claude products later. The Claude Code documentation lists MCP tasks as a public beta that needs Claude Code v2.1.304 or later.

A task is a long job, such as deep research, a report export or a build, that the MCP server runs on its own. Claude's tool call returns as soon as the server accepts the job, so Claude can keep working, and the result goes to Claude when the job ends. Running tasks appear in /tasks, where they can be stopped. A task on a remote server keeps running after the user exits and can be followed again by resuming the same session.

Elicitations let a server ask the user for input mid-task, such as confirming a refund or filling in a missing detail. Claude Code shows either a form with fields defined by the server or a prompt to open a link in the browser. According to the docs, tasks need a connection on protocol revision 2026-07-28 and do not work on third-party providers such as Amazon Bedrock; the VS Code extension and the desktop app do not have them.