Session Persistence Wins: Why Claude's MCP Architecture Outperforms ChatGPT

ChatGPT and Claude handle MCP sessions fundamentally differently—ChatGPT creates a new session for every tool call, while Claude maintains a single persistent session. This architectural choice forces ChatGPT developers to pay repeated initialization overhead (potentially 300-500ms per conversation) and sacrifice in-memory state management. For anyone building MCP applications, recognizing these platform differences is essential to optimizing performance and avoiding common pitfalls.