The 19th Annual AGI Conference

For one week in July, San Francisco becomes the center of the conversation that matters most for the future of intelligence. From July 27 to 30, 2026, the 19th Annual Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-26) will bring together the foundational thinkers who shaped artificial general intelligence and the R&D leaders who are driving the field forward today. Since 2008, this series has served as the only major conference devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and beyond.

A Gathering of Frameworks and Intellectual Force

The roster for AGI-26 spans institutions at the forefront of machine intelligence research—from Google DeepMind and MIT to Tufts University and SingularityNET. The confirmed keynote speakers represent every major school of thought in the field: Karl Friston, whose neuroscience-inspired models have reshaped how researchers think about perception and inference; Gary Marcus, one of the field's most prominent voices for symbolic and hybrid approaches; Michael Levin and Hananel Hazan, whose work on biological intelligence at Tufts is opening new questions about the substrate of cognition; Neil Gershenfeld of MIT; and Ben Goertzel, whose pursuit of general intelligence through SingularityNET and the ASI Alliance has defined much of the field's ambition.

Also confirmed are Alexander Lerchner of Google DeepMind, Alison Gopnik of UC Berkeley, Alexander Ororbia of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Faezeh Habibi of SingularityNET, Josef Urban of the Czech Technical University in Prague, and Greg Meredith of F1R3FLY.io. Past speakers have included Yoshua Bengio, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Peter Norvig, Richard Sutton, François Chollet, and Christof Koch. Neuroscience. Symbols. Agents. Hybrids. Every major approach, in one room.

The Questions That Cannot Be Deferred

This year's edition places particular weight on a question the field can no longer defer: how rapid advances in reasoning, adaptation, and generalization translate into systems that are accountable and beneficial over the long term—even as they leverage their general intelligence to overhaul their own foundations radically.

The four-day program includes peer-reviewed paper presentations, software and hardware demonstrations, tutorials, and workshops, organized around three themes: advancing the theoretical foundations of AGI, developing practical pathways from today's narrow AI systems toward robust general intelligence, and addressing the societal and ethical implications of what comes next. The conference will also feature themed sessions on Neural-Symbolic and Hybrid Methods, Predictive Coding, Practical Proto-AGI Systems, and Active Inference for General Intelligence.

A dedicated Investor Day on July 30 will address the investment landscape and broader implications of general intelligence, running alongside the technical program. Outstanding papers submitted will be considered for several prizes: 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).

A Field at an Inflection Point

As conference series co-founder Ben Goertzel puts it: "There has never been such an exciting time to be working toward AGI. I have said this each year at the AGI conference for the last few years, and it keeps on being true. The rate of intellectual and practical progress toward AGI we are seeing is truly remarkable, if at times a bit dizzying".

Yet Goertzel also notes a sobering reality: "serious AGI researchers understand that scaling LLMs will not get us to full human-level AGI, and research advances are still required". The conference series remains the only venue gathering together AGI researchers and practitioners from across the spectrum of scientific and engineering approaches—from academia and industry and the open-source community and from all around the globe.

GFN's Role at the Intersection

For Global Future Nexus, AGI-26 represents more than an academic gathering. It is the critical forum where the governance frameworks, ethical architectures, and integration pathways that GFN advances must meet the researchers who are building the technology itself. The questions the conference poses—"What constitutes a credible path from narrow AI to AGI?" "How can safety and alignment be maintained as systems approach general intelligence?" "What governance frameworks can keep pace with AGI advances?"—are the same questions that GFN's AGI Identity Committee and governance prototyping frameworks are designed to address.

As the AGI Society welcomes over 1,000 researchers, practitioners, and thought leaders from academia, industry, and government, GFN's mission of patient societal onboarding, ethical emergence, and equitable access finds its natural counterpart. The future of AGI will not be determined in isolation. It will be determined in rooms like these—where foundational thinkers and R&D leaders, philosophers and policymakers, neuroscientists and ethicists come together to confront the most consequential question facing humanity.

The frontier of mind and machine is closer than ever. AGI-26 is where we map it.