Meta Connect 2026

Meta Connect 2026 is Meta's annual flagship event, running 23-24 September 2026 at the company's Menlo Park campus, with the headline keynote beginning at 4pm Pacific on 23 September and streamed worldwide. Connect spans Meta's two biggest bets — artificial intelligence and the metaverse — and has become essential viewing for the AI community because Meta, through its Llama models and open releases, is among the most influential forces in open-weight AI. The audience is deliberately broad: app and AI developers, mixed-reality and wearables builders, and technology watchers tracking where on-device, ambient AI is heading.

What's on the 2026 agenda

Connect traditionally opens with a keynote that lays out Meta's product direction for the year, followed by deeper developer sessions that unpack the tooling. For 2026 the company has signalled its focus areas without disclosing every detail in advance: the next generation of AI models and the Meta AI assistant, the Ray-Ban and other smart-glasses lines, and the Quest mixed-reality platform. Ahead of the show Meta has openly teased a new pair of smart glasses, a strong hint that wearable, camera-equipped AI — assistants that can see what you see and act on it — will sit at the centre of the headline narrative. The pairing of a consumer-facing keynote with technical developer tracks is part of what gives Connect its reach: the same announcements that make headlines for shoppers also land as documentation, model weights and SDK updates for engineers within days. Expect the programme to span:

• The Llama model family and the developer tools for building with Meta's open weights
• The Meta AI assistant woven across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger
• Smart glasses and wearables as a primary surface for hands-free, contextual AI
• Quest and Horizon mixed-reality hardware, software and the developer platforms behind them

Who should attend

Connect is most valuable to developers building on open models, makers working at the intersection of AI and hardware, and product and strategy teams gauging the open-versus-closed dynamic that defines the 2026 landscape. Because so many products, startups and research projects are built on Llama, what Meta releases at Connect — and crucially how it licenses it — ripples across the whole ecosystem and shapes what independent teams can run without renting access to a closed API. The event is also a key checkpoint for anyone interested in spatial computing and wearables, a domain where Meta has invested heavily and pushed one of the more credible visions of AI that lives off the screen and on the face. Even those committed to rival platforms watch Connect to calibrate where the open-source frontier sits.

Why it matters now

Two storylines make Connect 2026 consequential. The first is the open-weight strategy. Meta's model releases effectively set the floor for what developers and enterprises can self-host rather than consume through a metered API, and each new model reshapes the balance of power between open and proprietary AI — a tension that has defined much of the industry's debate. The second is the convergence of AI and hardware. As assistants move from chat windows into glasses and headsets, Connect is where Meta demonstrates ambient, on-device intelligence — contextual help, real-time translation, visual understanding of the world in front of you — in shipping consumer form rather than as a research demo. Taken together, these threads make Connect a reliable annual gauge of two of the most important questions in applied AI: how open the foundational models will be, and how quickly AI moves into the devices people wear. For an industry still arguing over whether intelligence belongs in the cloud or on the device, and over how much capability should be freely available to all, Connect supplies fresh evidence each September rather than speculation.

How to attend

Meta Connect is a hybrid event: a limited in-person gathering at the Menlo Park campus combined with a free, publicly streamed keynote and developer content available to anyone, anywhere. In practice most people experience Connect online, and Meta typically publishes the keynote and recorded developer sessions for on-demand viewing shortly afterward, so the announcements are easy to follow even without a seat in the room. Those who want to watch live should register for the livestream and check meta.com/connect for the schedule, the developer session catalogue and any in-person details as they are confirmed in the weeks before the dates.