Event: AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026
Dates: October 22-23, 2026
Location: San Jose McEnery Convention Center, San Jose, California
Host: Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), under the Linux Foundation
What the event is
AGNTCon + MCPCon is the Agentic AI Foundation’s flagship conference for the open agentic AI ecosystem, and the North American edition is the bigger of the two annual stops. The Amsterdam edition ran in September. San Jose closes out the year with two days of keynotes, technical sessions and workshops, aimed squarely at the people who have to keep agent systems running after the demo is over.
The organisers expect more than 3,500 attendees from over 1,000 organisations. The program carries 150+ talks across 11 tracks, plus five hands-on workshops that are included in the registration fee rather than sold separately. It is a community event, and vendor sales pitches are explicitly barred from the program (sponsors get a demo theater instead).
The three projects underneath it
The conference is organised around the foundation’s projects: the Model Context Protocol, the open-source agent framework goose, and the AGENTS.md specification. MCP gets the most stage time, as the name suggests.
The MCP track is built around the 2026-07-28 specification, which is a substantial revision: a move to a stateless core, a new extensions framework, and changes to authorization. Sessions cover what migrating existing clients and servers actually involves. If you maintain an MCP server in production, that is the practical reason to be in the room.
Program focus
The technical content leans hard toward operations rather than novelty. Recurring themes across the tracks include:
- Agent evaluation and testing
- Observability and reliability
- Identity, permissions and access boundaries
- Sandboxing, routing and agent gateways
- Multi-agent coordination and interoperability standards
- Agentic payments and cost control
- Enterprise adoption and open source governance
Workshop topics follow the same line: building shared agent workflows, configuring an open agent stack, securing MCP and agent actions, and testing where access controls break. The last one is worth flagging. Agent permission models are where most production incidents are coming from right now, and a workshop built around breaking them is more useful than another architecture talk.
Keynote speakers
The keynote list mixes protocol authors, platform engineers and researchers:
- Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media
- Thomas Dohmke, former CEO of GitHub, now co-founder and CEO of Entire
- David Soria Parra, co-creator of MCP, Anthropic
- Bradley Axen, creator and maintainer of goose, Block
- Sarah Drasner, Distinguished Engineer, AI and Web Ecosystem, Chrome, Google
- Dawn Song, professor of computer science and co-director of Berkeley’s Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence
- Chi Wang, founder of AutoGen/AG2 and MassGen, Google DeepMind
- Rao Surapaneni, VP/GM, Business Application Platform, Google
- Manik Surtani, CTO, and Angie Jones, VP, both of the Agentic AI Foundation
- Mark Collier, executive director, PyTorch Foundation
- Idit Levine, founder and CEO, Solo.io
- Lena Hall, senior director, developers and AI, Akamai
- J.R. Storment, executive director, Tokenomics Foundation
Who it is for
The target audience is open source developers and contributors working on MCP and related agent technologies, project maintainers and standards people, enterprise engineers and architects building agentic applications, platform and security and observability teams supporting those systems, and academic researchers working on the foundations. Decision-makers are welcome, but the sessions assume you can read a spec.
Registration, cost and extras
Standard registration closes on October 7, after which late pricing of $925 applies from October 8. Linux Foundation and AAIF members can request a 20% discount code, groups of ten or more get 25% off, and discounted academic and student registrations are available with proof of enrolment or employment. Travel funding and visa letter requests are handled through the event site.
Add-ons beyond the main program include the Model Context Protocol Associate (MCPA) certification exam, poster presentations, a demo theater, evening events, co-located events, and a Kids Day. Diamond sponsors include Akamai, AWS, Google Cloud, Auth0, Block, Solo.io, TrueFoundry and the Tokenomics Foundation.
The event tagline is “Where the agent stack is being built.” For once that is close to accurate, since the people who wrote the protocol and the people running it in production will be in the same building.