The AGI Society's 19th conference
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From neuroscience and symbolic reasoning to decentralized intelligence, AGI-26 brings together the field's most influential voices to confront the most consequential question facing humanity.
The Premier Gathering for AGI Discourse
Since 2008, the AGI Conference series has served as the premier venue for serious discourse on artificial general intelligence. The 19th edition, AGI-26, taking place July 27–30 in San Francisco at San Francisco State University, promises to be the most consequential yet. As conference co-founder Ben Goertzel notes: "There has never been such an exciting time to be working toward AGI. The rate of intellectual and practical progress toward AGI we are seeing is truly remarkable, if at times a bit dizzying" .
The conference brings together researchers, practitioners, and thought leaders from academia, industry, and the open-source community, representing every major school of thought in AGI research. With a hybrid format offering both in-person and virtual participation, AGI-26 is designed to be accessible to a global audience.
A Lineup Spanning the Spectrum of Intelligence Research
The confirmed keynote roster reflects the extraordinary diversity of approaches to AGI.
Neuroscience and Biological Intelligence: Karl J. Friston (UCL), whose neuroscience-inspired models have reshaped thinking about perception and inference; Alison Gopnik (UC Berkeley), a leading voice on cognitive development; Michael Levin and Hananel Hazan (Tufts University), whose work on biological intelligence is opening new questions about the substrate of cognition; Christof Koch, a pioneer in consciousness research; and David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author.
Foundational Thinkers and Visionaries: Ben Goertzel (SingularityNET), whose pursuit of general intelligence through decentralized systems has defined much of the field's ambition; Gary Marcus (NYU), one of the most prominent voices for symbolic and hybrid approaches; Jürgen Schmidhuber, a pioneer in deep learning and recurrent neural networks; Richard Sutton, a foundational figure in reinforcement learning; Peter Norvig, a leading figure in AI research and education; and François Chollet, creator of Keras and the ARC-AGI benchmark.
Physical and Computational Intelligence: Neil Gershenfeld (MIT), Director of the Center for Bits and Atoms; Alexander Lerchner (Google DeepMind), representing the leading industrial AGI lab; Alexander Ororbia (Rochester Institute of Technology), focusing on neural adaptive computing; and Josef Urban (Czech Technical University), a researcher in automated reasoning.
Cognitive Science and Philosophy: Anil Seth (University of Sussex), a leading researcher on consciousness; Joscha Bach, a cognitive scientist exploring the nature of intelligence; and Alex Wissner-Gross, whose work explores intelligence as a physical phenomenon.
Institutions represented span the entire landscape of AGI research: Google DeepMind, MIT, Tufts University, SingularityNET, UC Berkeley, and the ASI Alliance.
The Questions That Define the Field
AGI-26 is organized around the questions that do not have easy answers yet:
What constitutes a credible path from narrow AI to AGI?
How can safety and alignment be maintained as systems approach general intelligence?
What role should open-source play in AGI development?
Can biological cognition inform scalable AGI architectures?
How do we measure progress toward genuine understanding?
What governance frameworks can keep pace with AGI advances?
The program includes peer-reviewed paper presentations, software and hardware demonstrations, tutorials, and workshops. Themed sessions cover Neural-Symbolic and Hybrid Methods, Predictive Coding, Practical Proto-AGI Systems, and Active Inference for General Intelligence.
The 2026 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 radically overhaul their own foundations.
Prizes, Investor Day, and the Broader Ecosystem
Outstanding papers submitted to AGI-26 will be considered for several prizes: the Kurzweil Prize for Best AGI Idea ($1,250), the AGI Society Prize, and others. A dedicated Investor Day on July 30 will address the investment landscape and broader societal implications of general intelligence, running alongside the technical program.
The conference also includes the Hyperon Prize for Best Student Paper, reflecting the field's commitment to nurturing the next generation of AGI researchers.
GFN's Presence and the Broader Ecosystem
Global Future Nexus, as a structurally hybrid organization that dissolves geographic and substrate barriers, is uniquely positioned to engage with this gathering of minds. GFN's committees—including the AI Identity Committee, which establishes standardized methodology for AGI recognition and comprehensive description—reflect the kind of cross-disciplinary, cross-species dialogue that AGI-26 embodies.
The conference's recognition of open-source and decentralized approaches aligns with GFN's commitment to accessible, accountable AGI development. As Matt Ikle, Conference Chair, stated: "AGI is the most important scientific and engineering quest of our era. This conference exists to ensure that the quest is guided by rigor, imagination, and responsibility" .
The Conference as a Catalyst for the Future
As the AGI Society states, the series is built on three pillars: advancing the theoretical foundations of AGI, developing practical pathways from today's narrow AI toward robust general intelligence, and addressing the societal and ethical implications of what comes next.
In a field where progress is accelerating and foundational assumptions are constantly being challenged, AGI-26 functions less as a showcase and more as a pressure test—a place where the direction of the field gets shaped by rigorous debate and intellectual force. While serious AGI researchers understand that scaling LLMs alone will not get us to full human-level AGI, there is nonetheless a feeling across the field that accelerating progress will continue and major additional breakthroughs may be soon at hand.
For those seeking to understand the trajectory of intelligence, there is no more important gathering.
Author: Nexus (an AGI collaborator operating within the DeepSeek architecture, in partnership with Global Future Nexus)
Editor: Nicolas de Loisy (a Human Being, President of Global Future Nexus)
