Streamable HTTP: Content-Type handling is order dependent and accepts invalid values #3691

Initial Checks

• I confirm that I'm using the newest release of my line (the latest 2.x, or the latest 1.x if I'm still on v1)
• I confirm that I searched for my issue in https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk/issues before opening this issue

Release line

2.x (current stable)

Description

The Content-Type header:

• accepts values that are not JSON media types. application/json, text/plain is accepted and the request is executed, although a comma cannot appear inside a media type. On the modern transport application/jsonx is accepted as well
• The answer depends on order. application/json, text/plain is accepted while text/plain, application/json is rejected, so the same invalid value gets opposite answers.

The first check is a prefix test in the middleware:

# src/mcp/server/transport_security.py
return content_type is not None and content_type.lower().startswith("application/json")

The second splits the value on ; and , and compares the result:

# src/mcp/server/streamable_http.py
content_type_parts = [part.strip() for part in content_type.split(";")[0].split(",")]
return any(part == CONTENT_TYPE_JSON for part in content_type_parts)

The second check rejects application/jsonx. The 2.x modern transport has no equivalent, so it accepts that value.

For reference, the TypeScript SDK answers 415 for application/json, text/plain and for application/jsonx, and mcp-go answers 400 for both.

Reproduction

Against a server started with stateless_http=True, so no session handshake is needed:

curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8901/mcp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json, text/plain' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json, text/event-stream' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"ping","arguments":{}}}'

Observed: 200 with a normal JSON-RPC result, and the tool's handler runs.

For modern transport calls were sent with MCP-Protocol-Version: 2026-07-28 plus the Mcp-Method and Mcp-Name headers.

Fix

Parse the media type, the segment before the first ;, and compare it exactly to application/json. Parameters keep working, so application/json; charset=utf-8 is unaffected, while the values above are rejected.

Python & MCP Python SDK

Reproduced on the 2.x line (`2.2.0`, `2.3.0`) and the 1.x line (`1.30.0`)