The AI Collective has been named the official community partner of AGI-26, marking a collaboration that aims to strengthen the connection between frontier artificial general intelligence (AGI) research and the rapidly growing community of engineers, founders, and practitioners building AI products today.
The partnership brings together two complementary ecosystems. AGI-26, the longest-running conference dedicated to artificial general intelligence, has spent nearly two decades convening leading researchers exploring the future of machine intelligence. The AI Collective, meanwhile, has built one of the world’s largest communities of AI builders, bringing together more than 250,000 founders, developers, enterprise leaders, and practitioners focused on deploying AI in real-world applications.
Together, the organizations plan to create more opportunities for collaboration between researchers developing next-generation AI systems and the builders translating those advances into practical products.
“The path to AGI runs through people as much as models,” said AJ Green, Executive Director of The AI Collective. “Our community is focused on the judgment, skills, and experience required to build with increasingly capable AI systems. We’re excited to partner with AGI-26 and help bring more practitioners into the conversation.”
Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET and one of the pioneers of AGI research, said the partnership comes at an important moment for the industry.
“The push toward AGI is expanding far beyond traditional research circles,” Goertzel said. “By bringing together AGI researchers and The AI Collective’s global builder community, we have an opportunity to accelerate innovation while making advances in AGI more practical and accessible.”
As part of the collaboration, members of The AI Collective will gain expanded opportunities to participate in AGI-26 through speaking sessions, workshops, and networking events. The conference will also feature programming focused on practical AGI adoption, giving founders and engineers a platform to share lessons from deploying AI systems in production while encouraging greater collaboration with academic researchers.
The partnership reflects a broader shift across the AI industry, where advances in reasoning models and increasingly capable AI systems are creating demand for closer collaboration between research institutions and companies bringing those technologies into real-world use.
Now in its 19th year, AGI Conference remains the only major conference series dedicated exclusively to artificial general intelligence. The 2026 edition will take place from July 27 to July 30 in San Francisco and will be available in both in-person and virtual formats.
This year’s speaker lineup includes several of the field’s most influential voices, including Ben Goertzel, Karl Friston, Gary Marcus, Neil Gershenfeld, Michael Levin, HananelHazan, Alexander Lerchner of Google DeepMind, Alexander Ororbia, FaezehHabibi, Reza Rassool, Josef Urban, and Greg Meredith.
The conference continues its tradition of bringing together experts representing diverse approaches to AI, including neuroscience-inspired architectures, symbolic reasoning, biological intelligence, hybrid systems, and next-generation agent frameworks.
Over the years, AGI Conference has hosted many of the most recognizable names in artificial intelligence research, including Jürgen Schmidhuber, YoshuaBengio, Peter Norvig, Richard Sutton, Christof Koch, and François Chollet.
With AI rapidly moving from research labs into mainstream products and enterprise workflows, the partnership between AGI-26 and The AI Collective highlights a growing industry focus on ensuring that breakthroughs in AGI research are matched by practical experience from those building and deploying AI systems at scale.
