AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026: Dates, Venue, Tickets & Guide
October 22-23, 2026
TL;DR: AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026 runs October 22-23, 2026 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California, with a kickoff party the night before on October 21. It’s the flagship conference of the...
TL;DR: AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026 runs October 22-23, 2026 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California, with a kickoff party the night before on October 21. It’s the flagship conference of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), the Linux Foundation-backed home for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block’s goose, and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md. Early bird tickets run $375 through July 28, 2026, climbing to $475 for standard registration and $925 at the door, with a flat $149 academic rate and a 20% discount for Linux Foundation and AAIF members.
I track AI and developer conferences the same way I track AI tool deals: by checking whether the agenda matches what’s actually shipping in production, not what a marketing team wants to sound cutting edge. AGNTCon + MCPCon cleared that bar the moment I saw who is behind it. It’s the event tied directly to the Model Context Protocol, the open standard that’s quietly become the plumbing for how AI agents talk to tools and data.
MCP was donated to the Linux Foundation by Anthropic in December 2025, alongside Block’s goose agent runtime and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md specification, and the resulting Agentic AI Foundation now counts AWS, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, Block, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare as Platinum members. When companies that normally compete for the same AI market agree to hand agent infrastructure to a neutral foundation, that’s worth paying attention to, and I flag moves like it in my AI news coverage.
In this guide, I’ll cover the confirmed dates and venue, what’s published about pricing and the program as of this writing, who genuinely gets value from two days in San Jose, and an honest verdict on the ticket. Every figure comes from the official AGNTCon + MCPCon North America event page and the Linux Foundation’s own registration and press materials.
Key Takeaways
- Dates and venue are locked. AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026 runs October 22-23 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, with a kickoff party on October 21.
- This is the MCP conference, literally. The event sits under the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), the Linux Foundation body that now governs the Model Context Protocol, Block’s goose, and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md.
- Pricing is published and tiered. Early bird registration is $375 through July 28, 2026, rising to $475 standard and $925 at the door, with a flat $149 academic rate.
- No confirmed speaker lineup yet. As of this writing, the Call for Proposals closed June 7, 2026, with notifications going out July 17 and a schedule announcement on July 21, so no named keynotes are public.
- The backing is unusually broad for a single event. Platinum members funding AAIF include AWS, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, companies that rarely co-sponsor the same infrastructure project.
A conference is only as credible as the people who show up to build the thing it’s named after. When Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft all fund the same open agent standard, the event built around it earns a closer look than most vendor-run AI summits.
What Is AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026?
AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026 is the flagship conference of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a Linux Foundation directed fund created to govern open standards for autonomous, interoperable AI agents. The event combines two co-located tracks, AGNTCon for broader agentic AI architecture and MCPCon for Model Context Protocol-specific development, plus a Solutions Showcase where vendors and open-source projects demo real implementations.
The agentic AI conference 2026 calendar around AAIF is bigger than this one event, overlapping with academic gatherings like the Berkeley Agentic AI Summit. San Jose is the North American anchor in a global series that also includes MCP Dev Summits in New York, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Seoul, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Toronto, plus a sister AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe event in Amsterdam on September 17-18, 2026. That’s a foundation building a recurring, global home for the people actually writing agent infrastructure code, not a one-off launch conference.
What makes AAIF worth tracking is the donation history behind it. Anthropic contributed the Model Context Protocol itself in December 2025, Block donated its goose agent runtime, and OpenAI handed over the AGENTS.md specification, all to the same neutral foundation. For anyone building MCP servers or agent tooling, that consolidation is the practical reason this conference matters more than most single-vendor developer events.
When and Where Is AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026?
AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026 takes place October 22-23, 2026, at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California, with a kickoff party the evening before on October 21 featuring a De La Soul concert. The two conference days run Thursday and Friday, each with keynotes, technical sessions, and the Solutions Showcase, plus an attendee reception Thursday evening.
San Jose puts the event in the middle of Silicon Valley, a short drive from the headquarters of most of the companies funding AAIF. That’s a deliberate choice for a conference built around production agent infrastructure, since the platform engineers and AI/ML architects this event targets are disproportionately based in the Bay Area or fly in for events like this regularly.
Quick facts:
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Event | AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026 |
| Dates | October 22-23, 2026 (kickoff party October 21) |
| Venue | San Jose McEnery Convention Center, San Jose, California |
| Format | In-person, two co-located tracks (AGNTCon + MCPCon) plus Solutions Showcase |
| Host | Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a Linux Foundation directed fund |
| Focus | Model Context Protocol (MCP), agent interoperability, goose, AGENTS.md |
| Official site | events.linuxfoundation.org/agntcon-mcpcon-north-america |
Who Should Attend AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026?
AGNTCon + MCPCon is built for the people actually writing agent infrastructure code, not executives who want a one-slide AI trend summary, the same builder audience as AI DevSummit 2026. The official program targets AI and ML engineers and architects building agentic systems for production, enterprise decision-makers like CTOs and VPs of Engineering evaluating agent platforms, open-source contributors and maintainers working on MCP and related projects, and DevOps and platform teams responsible for running agents reliably at scale.
You’re likely to get real value here if you fit one of these profiles:
- AI engineers building agents or MCP servers who want direct access to the people maintaining the protocol itself, not a secondhand explainer.
- Open-source contributors to MCP, goose, or AGENTS.md who want to influence the roadmap in person, not just file GitHub issues.
- Platform and DevOps teams running agent systems in production and trying to solve reliability, evaluation, and security problems that generic AI conferences don’t cover.
- Enterprise engineering leaders deciding whether to standardize on MCP internally, who want to hear directly from the companies (Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, AWS) already committed to it.
Here’s the honest caveat. If you’re new to agentic AI with no hands-on MCP or agent-framework experience, the CFP’s own topic list (evaluation methodologies, multi-agent systems, agentic payments infrastructure) signals a practitioner-level program, not an introductory one. This is a builder’s conference, and the ticket price reflects that.
Program, Speakers, and Session Formats
As of this writing, AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026 has not published a confirmed speaker lineup or detailed schedule. The Call for Proposals closed on June 7, 2026, with speaker notifications going out July 17, 2026, and the full schedule announced July 21, 2026. I’d rather tell you that plainly than guess at names, since inventing keynote speakers for a conference that hasn’t announced them helps nobody.
What is confirmed is the session structure and topic scope, published in the CFP itself. Sessions run as 25-minute talks, 25-minute panels, and 60-minute hands-on workshops. Core topics organizers solicited proposals on include building dependable agent systems, interoperability protocols (MCP and A2A), evaluation methodologies for agents, open infrastructure, agentic engineering practices, human-agent collaboration, enterprise adoption strategies, multi-agent systems, open source ecosystem health, and agentic payments infrastructure.
That topic list is a better signal than a keynote name anyway. Evaluation methodologies and agentic payments infrastructure are the kind of unglamorous, specific tracks that only show up on an agenda once a community is past the “look what agents can do” phase and working on “how do we trust them in production,” a maturation I chart in my AI trends tracker.
Registration and Ticket Pricing
AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026 tickets are tiered by registration window, with pricing published directly on the official Linux Foundation registration page.
| Ticket | Price | Window |
|---|---|---|
| Early Bird | $375 | April 2 - July 28, 2026 |
| Standard | $475 | July 29 - October 7, 2026 |
| Late / Onsite | $925 | October 8 - 23, 2026 |
| Academic | $149 flat | Any time, with valid institution verification |
Confirm current pricing directly on the official registration page before booking, since Linux Foundation events periodically adjust windows.
The jump between tiers is steep. Standard pricing is 27% more than early bird, and the late window nearly doubles the standard rate. If you know your team is attending, locking in the early bird rate before July 28, 2026, is the easiest way to cut the cost, bigger than the discount programs below.
Academic pricing at a flat $149, available to current full-time students, faculty, and staff with verification, is genuinely one of the more accessible entry points into a major agentic AI conference.
Discounts and Group Registration
There’s one real discount published for AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026: a 20% discount for Linux Foundation and Agentic AI Foundation members, available by contacting events@linuxfoundation.org to request the code. There is no publicly listed AGNTCon-specific partner or reader discount beyond that, and I’m not going to invent one just to make this guide sound more generous than the official site actually is.
Refunds are available for cancellations at least two weeks before the event, minus a 6% processing fee, and attendees can transfer their registration to someone else instead of canceling outright. Media representatives can request complimentary access directly through the organizers.
If you want a heads-up the next time a real discount or deadline drops for an AI event like this, subscribe for AI event and deal alerts instead of relying on a code that may not exist by the time you check.
Is AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026 Worth It? My Honest Take
For engineers and teams actually building on MCP, goose, or agent infrastructure, AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026 looks like one of the more credible events on the AI conference calendar this year, mainly because of who is funding it. A conference backed by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Bloomberg as Platinum members isn’t chasing hype. Those companies compete directly in the AI market and rarely fund the same open standard together.
The honest caveats are real, though. No confirmed speaker lineup exists as of this writing, so you’re registering on trust in the topic list and founding companies rather than a named keynote roster, and that gap closes only once the July 21, 2026 schedule lands. The event is also squarely a practitioner conference. If your team has no hands-on agent or MCP experience yet, send someone who already does and bring the findings back, rather than sending a beginner into sessions on evaluation methodologies and multi-agent systems.
My buy-or-wait framing, the same one I apply to any AI conference on my events tracker: register at the early bird rate now if your team is already building agent or MCP infrastructure and the CFP topics match problems you’re solving. Wait for the July 21 schedule if you need named sessions before committing budget, knowing that means paying the standard rate. Skip it only if your team has no current agent-building work, since this isn’t an introductory conference.
Travel, Hotels, and Getting to San Jose
The venue is the San Jose McEnery Convention Center at 150 W San Carlos Street, San Jose, CA 95113, right in the middle of downtown. If you’re flying in, Norman Y. Mineta San José International Airport (SJC) is the closest major airport to downtown, with San Francisco (SFO) and Oakland (OAK) as the larger fallback options if SJC fares are steep.
Where to stay
The Linux Foundation has a discounted room block at the San Jose Marriott, roughly a two-minute (about 417-foot) walk from the venue, with rates starting around $289 per night plus tax and including Wi-Fi and gym access. The block is shared with the co-located PyTorch Conference 2026 and other AGNTCon + MCPCon events, and it closes September 25, 2026. Book through the official venue and travel page early, because these room blocks usually sell out before the cutoff.
If the Marriott fills up, two other downtown hotels are within a short walk. The Linux Foundation hasn’t contracted rooms at these, so the conference rate isn’t guaranteed:
- Hyatt Place San Jose/Downtown - about a 3-minute walk (0.1 mi).
- Four Points by Sheraton San Jose Downtown - about a 6-minute walk (0.2 mi).
One honest heads-up on hotel booking
The Linux Foundation flags this on its own page, and it’s worth repeating: they will never phone you to book a hotel room. If someone calls or emails claiming to sell you a discounted conference room, treat it as a scam. Book only through the official room-block link or by calling the hotel directly.
International attendees
If you’re traveling from outside the US, the event runs a visa invitation-letter request process, and there’s a travel-funding program for people who need financial help attending. Both are handled through the official AGNTCon + MCPCon event site. Sort the visa letter early, since consulate appointments book out well ahead of October.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where is AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026?
AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026 runs October 22-23, 2026, at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California, with a kickoff party on October 21.
How much do AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026 tickets cost?
Early bird registration is $375 through July 28, 2026, rising to $475 for standard registration through October 7, and $925 at the door. Academic pricing is a flat $149 with verification.
Who organizes AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026?
The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a Linux Foundation directed fund, organizes the event. AAIF governs the Model Context Protocol (donated by Anthropic), Block’s goose agent runtime, and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md specification.
Are there confirmed speakers for AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026?
Not as of this writing. The Call for Proposals closed June 7, 2026, with speaker notifications on July 17 and a full schedule announcement on July 21, 2026.
Is there a discount code for AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026?
The only published discount is 20% off for Linux Foundation and AAIF members, available by emailing events@linuxfoundation.org. No other partner discount codes are listed on the official site.
Is AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026 good for people new to agentic AI?
It’s built for practitioners already working with agents, MCP, or agent frameworks. Total beginners will get more value learning the fundamentals first, then attending once they have hands-on context for the sessions.
The Bottom Line
AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026 is doing something most AI conferences only claim to do: bringing together the companies that actually build the infrastructure, not just the ones marketing around it. Between Anthropic’s MCP donation, Block’s goose, OpenAI’s AGENTS.md, and a Platinum member list that includes Google, Microsoft, and AWS at the same table, this event has a credibility floor most single-vendor AI summits don’t.
The insight worth taking with you: watch for the July 21, 2026 schedule announcement before you fully commit, but don’t wait so long that you miss the July 28 early bird deadline. Registering early and adjusting your travel plans once sessions are public is cheaper than waiting for certainty and paying the standard rate for it.
Your concrete next step for AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026: check the official event page, lock in the early bird rate before July 28 if your team is already building on MCP or agent infrastructure, and watch the CFP notifications for the confirmed program. While you’re evaluating agent tooling ahead of the trip, browse the MCP server leaderboard I maintain to see which servers are already production-ready.