AGI Society announces 19th annual summit on human-level AI

In this post:

• The AGI society has announced that the 19th annual AGI-26 conference will be held in San Francisco from July 27 to July 30, 2026, and will host researchers and engineers. 
• The AGI-26 has been the only major conference series dedicated to human-level AI development since its inception in 2008, gathering thinkers pursuing AGI goals. 
• The summit’s organizers announced that this year’s conference will also feature a dedicated “Investor Day” on July 30, in addition to the technical tracks.

The AGI society has announced that the 19th annual AGI-26 conference will be held in San Francisco from July 27 to July 30, 2026, and will host researchers and engineers. The AGI-26 has been the only major conference series dedicated to human-level AI development since its inception in 2008, gathering thinkers pursuing AGI goals. 

According to the AGI society, the upcoming AGI-26 summit will host participants in a hybrid format, offering both in-person and virtual attendance. The 2026 edition not only comes at a time of rapid acceleration in AI development, but also arrives as theoretical research increasingly translates into systems capable of reasoning, adaptation, and broader generalization.

AGI-26 is expected to bring together many of the industry’s foundational thinkers who have helped shape the field alongside the R&D leaders pushing its boundaries today. Notably, past speakers in the AGI conference series include Jürgen Schmidhuber, Gary Marcus, Yoshua Bengio, Ben Goertzel, Peter Norvig, Christof Koch, Richard Sutton, Michael Levin, and François Chollet. 

The gathering of such industry KOLs reflects the summit’s role as a forum for rigorous debate on competing frameworks for long-term visions of AI. The conference, with over 18 editions, has welcomed over 1,000 researchers, practitioners, and thought leaders from across academia and government.

Conference Chair says AGI-26 is a key engineering quest of this era

AGI-26 conference chair Matt Ikle said that the summit is the most important engineering and scientific quest of this era, adding that it exists to ensure that the pursuit is guided by rigor, responsibility, and imagination. The AGI society further explained that this year’s four-day program will feature peer-reviewed paper presentations, hardware demonstrations, tutorials, and workshops.

Meanwhile, this year’s AGI-26 key themes will also include credible pathways from narrow AI to AGI, insights from biological cognition that may inform scalable architectures for general intelligence, and safety and alignment protocols. The AGI society has officially opened calls for papers, including original research across several formats, such as 10-page regular papers and four-page technical communications. The submission deadline is April 13, and outstanding contributions will be eligible for several honors, including the Kurzweil Prize for Best AGI Idea ($1,250), the AGI Society Prize for Progress Toward AGI ($1,000), the Springer Prize for Best AGI Paper ($1,000), and the Hyperon Prize for Best Student Paper ($250). 

Conference to host a dedicated Investor Day  

According to the AGI-26 organizers, this year’s conference will also host a dedicated “Investor Day” on July 30 in addition to the technical tracks. The investor day event is expected to address the investment landscape and broader societal implications of general intelligence. 

Meanwhile, the organizing team has announced that early-bird registration is open through March 31, 2026. The AGI society emphasizes that this year’s edition will facilitate global cooperation and communication to publicise knowledge and diverse views concerning the future of artificial general intelligence. 

The series is built on three pillars: advancing the theoretical foundations of AGI, developing practical methodologies for advancing from current AI software to robust AGI, and addressing the societal and ethical implications of general intelligence. The 2026 event will be sponsored by SingularityNET (co-organizer), TrueAGI (gold sponsor), and the Artificial Intelligence Alliance (silver sponsor).