Event: AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026
Dates: 17-18 September 2026
Location: RAI Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Host: Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), under the Linux Foundation
What the event is
AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe is the European edition of the Agentic AI Foundation’s flagship conference, and it opens at RAI Amsterdam this Thursday. The programme merges two strands that used to run separately: AGNTCon, covering agent architectures and infrastructure, and MCPCon, covering the Model Context Protocol. It also absorbs the European MCP content that MCP Dev Summit Europe previously carried, so this is now the single European venue for the MCP agenda.
Two days, one main auditorium plus breakout rooms, and workshops included in the registration fee rather than sold as a separate ticket. The North American edition follows on 22-23 October in San Jose.
Stateless MCP is the story
If there is one theme running through the Amsterdam keynotes, it is the MCP 2026-07-28 specification and its move to a stateless core. Shaun Smith of Hugging Face, who maintains the transport working group, has a Friday morning keynote on getting stateless MCP into production, and he shares a Thursday breakout with Google’s Kurtis Van Gent on where MCP transports are heading. The spec also brings an extensions framework and changes to authorization, and a good part of the practical value of attending is hearing what migrating existing clients and servers actually costs.
David Soria Parra, co-creator of MCP and now at Anthropic, keynotes Thursday morning. Clare Liguori of AWS, a core maintainer of the specification, follows with a talk arguing that agents do not need to be always on.
Keynote lineup
- David Soria Parra, co-creator of MCP, Anthropic
- Clare Liguori, MCP core maintainer and senior principal engineer, AWS, on reactive agents
- Shaun Smith, MCP and transport working group maintainer, Hugging Face, on stateless MCP in production
- Mazin Gilbert, executive director, and Manik Surtani, CTO, both of the Agentic AI Foundation
- Angie Jones, VP of developer experience, Agentic AI Foundation, who also chairs an MCP challenges panel with GitHub, Hugging Face and Arcade
- Idit Levine and Keith Babo of Solo.io, on treating agents as actors in infrastructure
- Maarten Grootendorst, creator of BERTopic and KeyBERT, Google DeepMind
- Marlene Mhangami, senior developer advocate, Microsoft, on how GitHub is adapting to a human and agent workflow
- Sheng Liang, co-founder and CEO of Obot AI, making the case for an AI control plane for security and governance
- Dexter Horthy, co-founder and CEO of HumanLayer, on the state of the software factory
- Rachel-Lee Nabors, founder of Mima.social, on why the browser is not finished yet
- Frédéric Barthelet of Alpic and Dominic Farolino of Google, editor of the WebMCP specification, comparing MCP, WebMCP and plain CLI as ways to expose the same tool
That last one is worth watching. WebMCP and CLI-based tool exposure are genuine competitors to the MCP server model for a lot of use cases, and a keynote that puts the three side by side is more useful than another adoption pitch.
Workshops and certification
The hands-on sessions cover coordinating people and agents in shared workflows, building autonomous and coding-agent harnesses, implementing persistent memory, routing and securing MCP and LLM traffic through an agent gateway, and governing agent actions across MCP servers, CLIs, Skills and agent-generated code. There is no extra fee for any of them.
The Model Context Protocol Associate (MCPA) certification is available as an add-on, which is the first formal credential attached to the protocol.
Who is backing it
Diamond sponsors are AWS, Google Cloud, Obot.ai and Solo.io, with Block, WSO2, Runlayer, Vultr, FME by Safe Software and grapeup at platinum. The gold and startup tiers read like a map of the agent tooling market right now: gateways, auth layers, observability, agent memory, and a long list of databases repositioning themselves as agent state stores.
If you cannot get to Amsterdam
The keynotes are being livestreamed on the Agentic AI Foundation’s YouTube channel, and session recordings from previous foundation events are already posted there. Registration for the San Jose edition in October remains open, with standard pricing until 7 October.