AGI-26 brings top researchers together to debate future of AI

The AGI Society has confirmed the keynote speakers and full lineup for AGI-26, its 19th annual conference focused on Artificial General Intelligence, scheduled for July 27–30 in San Francisco.

The speaker list includes researchers from leading institutions in machine intelligence, including Google DeepMind, MIT, Tufts University, and SingularityNET, reflecting a range of approaches to AGI.

Confirmed speakers include Karl Friston, known for neuroscience-inspired models of perception and inference; Gary Marcus, a prominent advocate for symbolic and hybrid AI approaches; Michael Levin and Hananel Hazan, whose work at Tufts explores biological intelligence; Neil Gershenfeld; and Ben Goertzel, whose work with SingularityNET and the ASI Alliance has been central to efforts toward general intelligence.

Additional confirmed speakers include Alexander Lerchner, Alison Gopnik, Alexander Ororbia, Faezeh Habibi, Josef Urban, and Greg Meredith.

The lineup reflects a wide range of approaches across neuroscience, symbolic AI, agent-based systems, and hybrid models.

The four-day program will include peer-reviewed paper presentations, software and hardware demonstrations, tutorials, and workshops.

These are organized around three core themes: advancing the theoretical foundations of AGI, building practical pathways from current narrow AI systems toward general intelligence, and addressing the societal and ethical implications of future systems.

This year’s conference places particular focus on how rapid progress in reasoning, adaptation, and generalization can translate into systems that remain accountable and beneficial over the long term, even as they evolve.

The agenda also includes dedicated 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 focus on the investment landscape and broader implications of general intelligence, running alongside the main technical program.

Outstanding papers submitted to AGI-26 will be eligible for several awards, 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).

Since its founding in 2008, the AGI Conference Series has brought together more than 1,000 researchers, practitioners, and thought leaders from academia, industry, and government.

Past speakers include Jürgen Schmidhuber, Yoshua Bengio, Peter Norvig, Richard Sutton, Christof Koch, and François Chollet.

The series has served as a forum for testing core ideas and shaping the direction of the field, rather than simply showcasing progress.