AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026

AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026 takes place on October 22-23, 2026 in San Jose, California, hosted by the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation. It is a developer-first conference for the people building agentic AI systems — the engineers, researchers, and platform builders moving from prototype agents to production-ready, interoperable ones. At its centre sits the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard for securely connecting models to tools, data, and real-world systems.

Why an open agentic-AI conference now

2026 is the year agentic AI moved from demos to deployment, and with it came a hard problem: interoperability. Every model, framework, and vendor risked inventing its own way to let an agent call a tool or read a data source. MCP emerged as the open protocol to fix that — a common interface so an agent built on one stack can use tools and context from another without bespoke glue. AGNTCon + MCPCon is the gathering where that ecosystem coordinates in the open, rather than behind any single company's walls. The Agentic AI Foundation frames its events as advancing "the next generation of AI agents — from core infrastructure to the open protocols that make these systems work."

This North American edition is part of a global series the foundation runs through 2026, which also includes MCP Dev Summits in cities such as Bengaluru, Mumbai, Seoul, Shanghai, Toronto, and Nairobi, plus sibling AGNTCon + MCPCon editions in Japan and Europe. The San Jose event anchors the series in the heart of Silicon Valley, days after the PyTorch Conference in the same city, making late October a dense window for the open-source AI community in the Bay Area.

What the programme focuses on

Where a general AI summit covers strategy and use cases, AGNTCon + MCPCon is about the protocol and infrastructure layer that agents actually run on. Expect the agenda to concentrate on:

• The Model Context Protocol itself — specification, servers, clients, security model, and emerging extensions.
• Tool use and connectors — exposing data and capabilities to agents safely and at scale.
• Interoperability across frameworks, vendors, and runtimes, so agents compose rather than lock in.
• Production hardening — moving from working demos to reliable, observable, secure agent deployments.
• Open-source infrastructure for the agentic stack, contributed and maintained in the open.

How it fits the 2026 landscape

The timing is no accident. Through 2025 and into 2026, MCP went from a single vendor's proposal to a widely adopted open standard, with implementations appearing across IDEs, model providers, and enterprise platforms. Putting it under a neutral foundation matters: it signals that the protocol's governance, security model, and roadmap will be decided in the open by the community that depends on it, not dictated by one company. AGNTCon + MCPCon is where that governance conversation, and the engineering behind it, happens face to face.

Who should attend

This event is built for builders. The core audience is software engineers and architects implementing MCP servers and clients, developers building tool-using agents, platform and infrastructure teams responsible for running agents in production, and researchers working on agent interoperability and safety. Because it is a Linux Foundation event, there is a strong contributor culture: people who want to shape the protocol, not just consume it, will find the working sessions and call-for-proposals route particularly valuable. It is less suited to executives seeking a high-level market overview — for that, an enterprise-strategy summit is a better fit; AGNTCon + MCPCon rewards attendees who write or deploy code.

Format, dates, and how to attend

The conference runs as a two-day, in-person event on October 22-23, 2026 in San Jose. There is an open call for speakers, alongside registration and sponsorship through the Linux Foundation events platform, and registering early typically secures a lower rate. Attendees should book travel and lodging well ahead, given how busy San Jose is during the autumn AI conference season. For the authoritative schedule, confirmed speakers, and venue, consult the official Agentic AI Foundation events page, which is updated as the programme is finalised. For anyone serious about building interoperable, production-grade AI agents on open standards, AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026 is the technical event of record — a place to meet the maintainers of MCP and the wider agentic-AI infrastructure, compare implementation notes, and help steer where the open agent ecosystem goes next. As tool-use and multi-agent systems become the default shape of applied AI, the protocols debated in San Jose this October will shape how those systems are built for years to come.