update
Apr 8, 2026
By Teun
MCP expands maintainer team with new lead and core maintainer
The Model Context Protocol added Den Delimarsky as co-Lead Maintainer and Clare Liguori as Core Maintainer. The changes give the project more leadership capacity as it handles increasing SEP volume and prepares for production-grade features.
David Soria Parra, MCP's lead maintainer, announced two changes to the project's governance team on April 8. The additions reflect the protocol's growing complexity and the need for broader leadership as adoption accelerates.
Den Delimarsky is stepping up from Core Maintainer to co-Lead Maintainer. He is a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, working across the MCP specification, SDKs, governance, and developer experience. Before Anthropic, he was a Principal Product Engineer in Microsoft's CoreAI division, bringing experience across developer tools and platform ecosystems. His promotion to lead maintainer means the project now has two people who can make final decisions on spec changes, reducing the risk of a single bottleneck.
Clare Liguori is joining as a new Core Maintainer. She brings depth in developer-tooling and agent-runtime experience, and has already been contributing to discussions around unsolicited tasks, the agent execution model, and the Triggers and Events working group. Her background includes building developer tools at AWS, where she worked on container orchestration and CI/CD infrastructure. That production operations perspective is valuable as MCP moves toward features that need to work reliably at enterprise scale.
The additions address a practical bottleneck that has been growing for months. As MCP adoption has accelerated, the volume of Spec Enhancement Proposals has grown alongside it. Every SEP currently requires full Core Maintainer review regardless of domain, and the expanded team distributes that review load. The 2026 roadmap explicitly acknowledged this bottleneck and identified expanded leadership as a priority.
Soria Parra noted that the governance model introduced last summer has held up well through two specification releases, the move to the Agentic AI Foundation, and a steady increase in SEP volume. The contributor ladder, working groups, and formal review processes have all functioned as designed.
For the broader MCP community, the key takeaway is that the project is investing in governance as a feature, not just code. A protocol that thousands of production systems depend on needs predictable, well-staffed decision-making. The MCP Discord remains the best place to follow spec discussions and connect with the maintainer team directly.
