Peers recognize each other’s ability to use MP-BGP extensions by advertising the ability using the capabilities field during the session establishment. MP-BGP is an extension to BGP that allows BGP to carry routing information for multiple network layer protocols, such as IPv6, VPNv4, multicast, etc. To support MP-BGP, peers need to exchange their capabilities during the session establishment phase, which consists of three steps: open, keepalive, and update. In the open message, peers can include an optional parameter called capabilities, which indicates what kind of address families and subsequent address families they can support. If both peers agree on a common set of capabilities, they can proceed to exchange routing information for those address families using update messages56.

References: Use of MP-BGP Extensions for IPv6 Interdomain Routing, MP-EBGP Configuration Example - Cisco