Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026: Dates, Speakers & Price
August 1-2, 2026
TL;DR: The Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026 runs August 1-2, 2026 on the UC Berkeley campus, hosted by Berkeley RDI (Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence). Organizers expect 5,000-plus in-person...
TL;DR: The Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026 runs August 1-2, 2026 on the UC Berkeley campus, hosted by Berkeley RDI (Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence). Organizers expect 5,000-plus in-person attendees and 200-plus speakers across four stages, including Andrej Karpathy, Andrew Ng, and OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba, plus a global free livestream. Standard tickets are $499, the early-bird window already closed on July 5, and there is no ZPlatform-specific discount code for this event.
I track AI events for a living, and most “AI summits” are the same 40-minute keynote followed by a sponsor booth crawl. The Berkeley Agentic AI Summit is not that. It grew from roughly 2,000 in-person attendees and 40,000 online in 2025 to an expected 5,000-plus onsite for 2026, and that kind of growth curve on a single-topic event, agentic AI specifically, tells you something real is happening in the space, not just conference-circuit hype.
What earns this event a spot on my radar is who actually shows up. This is not a vendor showcase. It is Berkeley faculty who built the systems research behind modern AI (Ion Stoica, Dawn Song, Sergey Levine) sharing a stage with the people building the frontier labs (Andrej Karpathy, Wojciech Zaremba, Andrew Ng), alongside venture capital (Martin Casado at a16z, Alfred Lin at Sequoia) and policy voices. That mix of academia, builders, capital, and policy in one room is rare, and it is exactly the audience I care about tracking, the same reason I cover AI events that shape which tools and workflows show up in real engineering teams a few months later.
In this guide, I will walk through the confirmed dates and venue, the current ticket price and what happened to the early-bird window, the speaker lineup as it stands today, the program tracks and themes, who this event genuinely fits, and my honest verdict on whether the $499 ticket is worth it. Everything below is cross-checked against the official Berkeley RDI event page, UC Berkeley’s own newsroom coverage, and secondary reporting.
If you only need the short version: this is shaping up to be the largest single event dedicated to agentic AI, with real depth behind the size, and the free livestream option means budget or travel does not have to be the reason you miss it. Here is the full breakdown.
Key Takeaways
- Two days, one campus, four stages. The Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026 runs August 1-2 on the UC Berkeley campus, with a global free livestream for anyone not attending in person.
- Scale that has roughly doubled year over year. 2025 drew about 2,000 in-person and 40,000-plus virtual attendees. 2026 is projected at 5,000-plus in-person, with 200-plus speakers and 200-plus poster presentations.
- The speaker list mixes builders, researchers, and capital. Confirmed names include Andrej Karpathy, Wojciech Zaremba, Andrew Ng, Ali Ghodsi, and Berkeley faculty Sergey Levine, Ion Stoica, and Dawn Song, alongside VCs Martin Casado and Alfred Lin.
- Pricing is straightforward, and the early-bird deal is gone. Standard tickets are $499 as of this writing; the $399 early-bird rate closed July 5, 2026, and student tickets are already sold out.
- No ZPlatform discount exists for this one. Unlike some events we cover, there is no partnership code to apply here, and I am not going to pretend there is one.
An event built around agentic AI is only credible if the people building the agents actually show up. Berkeley pulled that off, and the growth from 2,000 to a projected 5,000-plus attendees in one year says the market noticed too.
What Is the Berkeley Agentic AI Summit?
The Berkeley Agentic AI Summit is a two-day conference dedicated entirely to agentic AI, meaning AI systems that plan, use tools, and act semi-autonomously rather than just generate text, hosted on the UC Berkeley campus by Berkeley RDI, the university’s Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence. The 2026 edition is explicitly positioned as the largest event dedicated to this specific topic, not a general AI conference with an agentic AI track bolted on.
Berkeley RDI runs the event alongside the Responsible Decentralized Intelligence Foundation, with UC Berkeley Haas professor Christine Parlour co-leading the organizing effort, according to Haas School of Business coverage of the event. That academic backbone is what separates this from a typical industry conference. The program is built around research rigor as much as product demos, which is a meaningful distinction if you have ever sat through a “keynote” that turned out to be a thinly disguised sales pitch.
What makes the 2026 edition notable is the trajectory. The 2025 summit drew roughly 2,000 in-person attendees and more than 40,000 virtual viewers. For 2026, organizers are planning for 5,000-plus in-person attendees, 200-plus speakers across four stages, and 200-plus poster presentations, plus an expanded global livestream. That is not incremental growth. That is a signal that agentic AI moved from a research niche to a mainstream engineering priority in the space of about a year, the same shift I track when I cover Model Context Protocol servers and the tooling ecosystem forming around autonomous agents.
This is not a trade-show floor event. Between the technical talks, the poster sessions, and the startup pitch competition, the sessions themselves are the product, not a backdrop for badge scans.
When and Where Is the Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026?
The Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026 takes place August 1-2, 2026, across the UC Berkeley campus in Berkeley, California. The event uses four separate venues or stages on campus rather than a single hall, and the official event page notes that the precise building locations are confirmed once you register.
Berkeley sits directly across the bay from San Francisco, roughly a 30 to 45 minute drive or BART ride depending on traffic and which BART station you use. That makes Oakland International Airport (OAK) and San Francisco International Airport (SFO) both realistic options for out-of-town attendees, with OAK generally the shorter transfer into Berkeley itself. If you have never been to a Berkeley campus event before, budget extra time for parking. Campus lots fill fast for anything drawing thousands of attendees, and rideshare or BART tends to be the more reliable option during the two-day window.
Early August sits in the quieter stretch between summer travel season and the fall academic rush, which is a smart scheduling window for a university-hosted event. It also means hotel pricing in the Bay Area, while never cheap, is not competing with peak tourist season the way a September or October date might.
Quick facts:
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Event | Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026 |
| Dates | August 1-2, 2026 |
| Venue | UC Berkeley campus, Berkeley, CA (four venues; exact locations confirmed at registration) |
| Format | In-person plus free global livestream |
| Scale | 5,000+ expected in-person, 200+ speakers, 4 stages, 200+ poster presentations |
| Host | Berkeley RDI (Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence) with the Responsible Decentralized Intelligence Foundation |
| Standard ticket | $499 (early bird closed July 5, 2026) |
| Official site | rdi.berkeley.edu/events/agentic-ai-summit-2026 |
Who Should Attend the Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026?
This event is built for people actively working on or around autonomous agent systems, not casual AI-curious attendees looking for a general trend overview. Based on the confirmed program and speaker mix, the strongest fits are AI and ML engineers building agent pipelines, researchers working on evaluation and safety, venture investors sourcing deals in the agentic AI space, and policy people trying to understand what they are actually regulating.
You will get real value here if you fit one of these profiles:
- AI engineers building agentic systems who want direct exposure to the infrastructure and framework talks in the developer-platform track, not just another “AI is changing everything” panel.
- ML researchers focused on evaluation and safety who want technical depth on agent benchmarks and security, an area where Dawn Song’s presence specifically signals serious content rather than a token safety session.
- Venture capitalists and investors sourcing deals in the agentic AI space, since Martin Casado (a16z) and Alfred Lin (Sequoia) speaking on the same agenda tells you where institutional capital is looking right now.
- Policy and governance professionals who need to understand autonomous AI systems technically before they can regulate or advise on them, rather than working from vendor marketing decks.
- Founders and product leaders building on top of agent frameworks who want to see what Databricks, DeepLearning.AI, and Google DeepMind leadership are prioritizing next.
Here is the honest caveat. If you are new to AI generally and looking for a beginner-friendly introduction, this is the wrong room. The program assumes you already know what an agent framework, a tool call, or an evaluation harness is. This is a working-practitioner and research event, not an AI 101 course, and the speaker list reflects that.
If you are weighing whether to send a four-person team, the math comes down to the same budget-versus-depth tradeoff I see with most conferences this size. Four standard tickets at $499 each runs close to $2,000 before flights and hotel, which is a real line item for a startup team. One workable split: send yourself and one senior engineer in person for the hallway conversations and workshop access, while the rest of the team watches the free livestream for the keynotes and main-stage talks. That split covers both the networking value and the content, without doubling the travel budget for a two-day event.
Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026 Speakers
The 2026 speaker lineup blends Berkeley’s own AI research faculty with leaders from the frontier labs building agentic systems commercially. Confirmed names include Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher and educator known for his work at OpenAI and Tesla before founding Eureka Labs, and Wojciech Zaremba, a co-founder of OpenAI.
Here are the confirmed speakers for the Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026, based on the official event page and UC Berkeley’s own reporting:
| Speaker | Known For |
|---|---|
| Andrej Karpathy | AI researcher and educator, founder of Eureka Labs |
| Wojciech Zaremba | Co-founder, OpenAI |
| Andrew Ng | Founder, DeepLearning.AI |
| Ali Ghodsi | Co-founder and CEO, Databricks |
| Sergey Levine | Robotics and reinforcement learning, UC Berkeley |
| Ion Stoica | Distributed systems, UC Berkeley; co-founder, Databricks |
| Dawn Song | AI security research, UC Berkeley |
| Pushmeet Kohli | VP of Science, Google DeepMind |
| Martin Casado | General Partner, a16z |
| Alfred Lin | General Partner, Sequoia Capital |
Beyond this list, the event’s 200-plus total speakers fill out four stages of content, and the organizers describe the full lineup as spanning academia, frontier labs, enterprise AI teams, and venture capital. The presence of Casado and Lin on the same agenda as Berkeley systems researchers is the clearest signal of what this event actually is: the point where agentic AI research meets the capital deciding which of it gets funded next.
What Does the Agenda Cover?
The Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026 program is organized around a plenary stage plus three named tracks, according to the official event page: Atlas (foundational research and model capabilities), Nexus (developer platforms and agent frameworks), and Compass (enterprise applications and safety). That structure means you are choosing between concurrent sessions across four stages rather than sitting through one fixed schedule.
Reported session topics span agentic AI infrastructure and platforms, software development with AI agents, robotics and world models, enterprise AI applications, agent evaluation and benchmarks, AI safety and security, and applications in finance, legal, and healthcare, plus scientific discovery use cases. That range matters because it reflects where agentic AI actually needs work right now. Building an agent demo is comparatively easy. Evaluating whether it is safe, reliable, and worth deploying at enterprise scale is the harder, less-solved problem, and the Compass track appears built specifically around that gap.
The event also includes a Startup Spotlight pitch competition, hands-on workshops, poster presentations, and side events running July 30 through August 4 around the main two-day program. If you are the type who gets more value from a working session than a keynote recording, the workshop and poster tracks are where that hands-on time lives, similar to how a masterclass format works at other technical conferences.
Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026 Ticket Prices
Ticket pricing is tiered, and the early-bird window has already passed. Early-bird pricing at $399 ran through July 5, 2026. Standard pricing of $499 has been in effect since July 6, 2026, and student tickets are listed as sold out on the event’s registration page.
| Ticket Type | Price | Status (as of July 15, 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Early Bird | $399 | Closed (ended July 5, 2026) |
| Standard | $499 | Current price |
| Student | N/A | Sold out |
| Virtual Livestream | Free | Registration required |
Confirm current availability on the official Berkeley RDI registration page before booking, since capacity is limited and pricing can change closer to the event.
A quick reality check on value here. $499 for two days with 200-plus speakers, four concurrent tracks, and access to a genuinely research-grade agenda is reasonable by industry-conference standards, especially compared to enterprise AI conferences that charge two to three times that for a comparable speaker tier. The bigger cost for most attendees will be travel and Bay Area hotel rates around the event dates, not the ticket itself.
Discounts and Pricing Honesty
I want to be direct about this instead of padding the section with vague language. I could not find a public group discount, alumni rate, or any other official discount program for the Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026 beyond the early-bird window that already closed on July 5. There is also no ZPlatform partnership code for this event, and I am not going to invent one just to make this guide look more useful than it is.
If a discount or group rate does surface before the event, it will most likely be announced directly on the official registration page, so that is the source to check before you buy, not a third-party roundup. The one genuinely free option on the table is the livestream, which gets you the plenary and main-stage content at no cost if the $499 standard ticket does not fit your budget right now.
Is the Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026 Worth It? My Honest Take
For AI engineers, researchers, and investors actively working in the agentic AI space, this event looks like one of the strongest single-topic conferences on the 2026 calendar, mainly because of who is actually in the room. A speaker list that puts Berkeley systems and security faculty next to OpenAI’s co-founder, DeepLearning.AI’s founder, and general partners at a16z and Sequoia is a genuine cross-section of the field, not a marketing-assembled lineup.
The honest caveats are about access and depth of information, not quality. Student tickets are already gone, the early-bird rate closed weeks before I am writing this, and several logistical details, exact venue buildings and any late-added discounts, are only confirmed once you register. None of that is a flaw in the event itself. It just means you should register early and check the official page directly rather than relying on any third-party summary, including this one, for the final details.
Here is my buy-or-skip framing, the same one I apply to any AI event I cover. Buy the $499 standard ticket if you are actively building, researching, or investing in agentic AI and can name two sessions across the Atlas, Nexus, or Compass tracks you would genuinely use in your work this quarter. Use the free livestream if budget or travel is the blocker. You still get the plenary and main-stage keynotes without the flight and hotel cost. Skip it entirely only if you are new to AI and looking for a beginner-friendly overview. This program assumes you already speak the language of agent frameworks and evaluation harnesses.
What Time Does the Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026 Start Each Day?
One detail the listicles skip is the daily timing, so here it is from the official program schedule. Day one, Saturday August 1, opens with plenary remarks at 9:15 AM PDT from UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons and Berkeley RDI’s Dawn Song, and the plenary track runs through roughly 5:30 PM. Day two, Sunday August 2, opens its plenary around 9:30 AM and follows the same all-day shape. The summit’s Luma listing frames both days as running about 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM PDT, so plan for two full days on campus, not a half-day drop-in.
Because the content runs across four concurrent stages, you physically cannot see everything, and pretending otherwise just leads to a wasted day. The same advice I give before any multi-track conference applies here: pull the schedule the night before, lock in the two or three sessions per day you actually need across the Atlas, Nexus, and Compass tracks, and treat the rest as flexible. If you are traveling in, that 9:15 AM Saturday start means an early morning against Bay Area traffic, so give yourself a real buffer.
How to Watch the Free Livestream (and Whether Recordings Show Up Later)
If you are not flying to Berkeley, the free livestream is the move, and it is more generous than most virtual passes. The official event page states that registering for the livestream gives you access to all sessions from anywhere in the world, not just the keynotes. You register through the summit’s Luma page: RSVP for the free Agentic AI Summit 2026 livestream here. It costs nothing beyond your email, so there is no reason to skip it if you cannot attend in person.
On recordings, I will be straight with you rather than guess: the organizers have not published a formal on-demand policy for 2026 that I could verify. What I can point to is precedent. Berkeley RDI posted full session videos from its 2025 Agentic AI Summit to its YouTube channel after the event, so on-demand replays are a reasonable expectation this year too, but not a guarantee. If catching the talks after the fact matters to you, register for the livestream anyway. That is the surest way to be notified if and when the replays go live.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where is the Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026?
The Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026 runs August 1-2, 2026, on the UC Berkeley campus in Berkeley, California, across four venues. Exact building locations are confirmed once you register, and a free global livestream is available for anyone not attending in person.
How much does a ticket cost?
Standard tickets are $499 as of this writing. The $399 early-bird rate closed on July 5, 2026, and student tickets are sold out. The livestream option is free but requires registration.
Who is speaking at the Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026?
Confirmed speakers include Andrej Karpathy, Wojciech Zaremba (OpenAI co-founder), Andrew Ng, Ali Ghodsi (Databricks CEO), and Berkeley faculty Sergey Levine, Ion Stoica, and Dawn Song, alongside VCs Martin Casado (a16z) and Alfred Lin (Sequoia Capital), as part of a lineup of 200-plus total speakers.
Is there a ZPlatform discount code for this event?
No. Unlike some events we cover, there is no ZPlatform partnership discount for the Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026. Any pricing changes or discounts would come directly from the official Berkeley RDI registration page.
Is this event good for AI beginners?
Not really. The program is built for practitioners already working on agentic AI systems, evaluation, or investment, not people looking for an introductory overview of AI concepts.
Can I attend without traveling to Berkeley?
Yes. A free global livestream covers the plenary and main-stage sessions, which is the practical option if the $499 ticket or Bay Area travel costs do not fit your budget this year.
The Bottom Line
The Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026 backs up its size with genuine substance. Between the Atlas, Nexus, and Compass tracks, a speaker list that spans Berkeley research faculty, frontier lab builders, and the venture capital funding the next wave of agent startups, and a free livestream option for anyone who cannot make the trip, this is shaping up to be one of the more credible large-scale events dedicated specifically to agentic AI.
The insight worth carrying with you: growth from roughly 2,000 in-person attendees in 2025 to a projected 5,000-plus in 2026 is not conference-marketing inflation. It is a direct reflection of how fast agentic AI moved from research curiosity to something engineering teams, investors, and policymakers all need to understand right now.
Your concrete next step for the Berkeley Agentic AI Summit 2026: check the official event page for current ticket availability, register for the free livestream if the in-person price does not fit your budget, and confirm venue details once your registration is confirmed. While you plan around it, browse the other AI events I’m tracking and subscribe for AI deal and event alerts so you catch the next one before tickets tighten up.