Agentic AI Weekly | Berkeley RDI | February 4, 2026
AgentX–AgentBeats Phase 1 Winners to be Announced, Berkeley Xcelerator, Agentic AI Summit Early-Bird Pricing + CFP Open, AgentBeats Workshops from Meta & PyTorch/Linux Foundation, and ICLR Workshop
AgentX–AgentBeats Highlights: Phase 1 Winners to Be Announced, Phase 2 Info Coming Soon
Thank you to everyone who participated in Phase 1 of the AgentX–AgentBeats Competition! We are excited by the number of submissions and the creativity, rigor, and thoughtfulness across all projects. With the Phase 1 submission window closed, our judges are actively reviewing and deliberating on all submitted projects.
Phase 1 winners will be announced later this month, and the full rules and guidelines for Phase 2 of the competition will be announced on February 16. We’re grateful to the community for the time and effort you’ve put into this first phase, and we’re looking forward to seeing your participation in Phase 2!
This month, Berkeley RDI is bringing you two new workshops for AgentX-AgentBeats—packed with practical guidance to elevate your AgentX‑AgentBeats projects (Phase 2) and meaningful insights for the broader agentic AI community.
On February 10, the Meta team will be hosting a workshop for the OpenEnv Challenge: a new initiative focused on building open-source reinforcement learning (RL) environments that help drive general intelligence. You’ll get expert guidance and an overview of the OpenEnv Challenge, and we hope to see you there!
Then, on February 18, the Linux / PyTorch Foundation will be hosting its own workshop to help you elevate your AgentBeats project with production-ready AI tools and best practices. Get an inside look at innovative open-source projects driving the future of agentic AI development. Plus, connect directly with PyTorch & Linux experts in a live Q&A, walking away with actionable guidance to take your project to the next level.
As Phase 1 judging gets underway, we want to acknowledge and thank the incredible group of judges who are reviewing submissions for the AgentX–AgentBeats Competition. The panel includes authors and contributors behind many of the widely used benchmarks, such as τ²-Bench, GAIA2, CyberGym, and AgentBench, alongside researchers from Google DeepMind, Meta, Sierra, Lambda, and other leading organizations.
We’re grateful to all of our judges who are participating in AgentX‑AgentBeats!
As of today, 1300+ teams from around the world have joined AgentX-AgentBeats. Hosted by Berkeley RDI, this global challenge builds on our amazing Agentic AI MOOC community of ~40K learners, uniting builders, researchers, engineers, and AI enthusiasts worldwide to build, benchmark, and push the boundaries of agentic AI.
Agentic AI Summit 2026 (Early-Bird Pricing and CFP are Live!)
Save the date! The Agentic AI Summit returns to Berkeley on August 1–2, 2026, welcoming 5,000+ expected in-person attendees for two days of insights and innovation. Building on last year’s sold-out success—with 2,000+ in‑person attendees and 40,000+ global livestream participants—the summit will bring together researchers, builders, industry leaders, and the global agentic AI community for keynotes, technical talks and panels, hands-on workshops, live demos, and more!
🎟️ Early‑Bird Pricing (Limited Capacity)
Early‑bird tickets are still available, with limited capacity:
Student Early-Bird: $99
Standard Early-Bird: $249
Prices will increase as early‑bird spots fill, and the Summit committee reserves the right to adjust pricing based on demand and capacity.
If you’re looking to secure the best ticket price and be part of the conversation shaping the future of Agentic AI, we encourage you to register early. We look forward to welcoming you to Berkeley this August.
We’re also excited to share that the Call for Speaking Proposals (CFP) for the Agentic AI Summit 2026 is now open!
If you’re interested in sharing your work through a technical talk, panel discussion, workshop, or tutorial, or poster presentation—and helping advance the frontiers of the Agentic AI—we warmly invite you and/or your team to apply and be part of the conversation at the Summit.
Please complete the form below to submit your proposal. The program committee will review submissions on a rolling basis.
Berkeley Xcelerator — Applications Now Open!
We’re excited to announce the Berkeley Xcelerator, a non-dilutive accelerator program designed to support pre-seed and seed-stage startups building at the forefront of Agentic AI.
The Xcelerator is built in partnership with Berkeley RDI’s research community and ecosystem partners, offering selected teams the support, resources, and guidance to take their startup to the next level! In addition, the Xcelerator is open to everyone; you do not need to be affiliated with UC Berkeley to apply!
Why apply to the Xcelerator?
Unparalleled access to frontier research and expertise through close collaboration with Berkeley RDI’s community across agentic AI, AI safety and security, and the broader AI landscape.
Practical enablement through industry partnerships, including cloud, GPU, and API credits provided by industry partners such as Google Cloud, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Nebius, with more to be announced!
Visibility and network effects through the Berkeley ecosystem and Berkeley RDI’s global community of 56,000+ developers and builders, including the rapidly growing Agentic AI MOOC community
A culminating Demo Day at the Agentic AI Summit (August 1–2, 2026), bringing together 5,000+ in-person attendees and placing your startup directly in front of top-tier VCs, leading AI researchers, industry executives, and strategic partners.
We’re looking for AI and Agentic AI startups at the pre-seed or seed stage. If you think that you or your team are a good fit, we encourage you to learn more and apply via the Xcelerator website and form below!
📅 Applications close at the end of February!
Our sincerest thanks to all of our sponsors and partners:
Workshop at ICLR 2026 | Agents in the Wild: Safety, Security, and Beyond
Quick reminder that the submission deadline for ICLR 2026’s Agents in the Wild: Safety, Security, and Beyond workshop is tomorrow for both regular and short paper tracks!
This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners across academia and industry to discuss emerging research directions and practical challenges in developing safe and secure agents.
By fostering collaboration across disciplines, the workshop will help chart the next steps toward reliable and trustworthy agent systems that can operate responsibly in open environments.
Help us spread the word about the event by sharing Professor Dawn Song’s tweet and LinkedIn post — we can’t wait to see you there!
Paper Submission Details
The Workshop on Agents in the Wild at ICLR 2026 invites submissions from researchers and practitioners exploring how intelligent agents can reason, act, and adapt safely and securely in open-ended real-world environments.
To submit a paper for the workshop, you can click the button below. Good luck!
Trends This Week
This past week, Google DeepMind released Project Genie, an application that lets users create, explore, and remix interactive worlds in real time. The prototype, which is in an experimental phase, is built on the company’s Genie 3, alongside Gemini and Nano Banana Pro. It can imitate dynamic physics, interactions, and evolving environments, opening up new opportunities in the fields of robotics and simulation.
OpenAI is reportedly laying early groundwork for a potential IPO as soon as Q4 of this year, accelerating its timeline in an attempt to beat Anthropic to public markets. The effort includes informal talks with banks and expansion of the company’s finance leadership, as it looks to support growing infrastructure and compute demands.
In a new study, Anthropic’s research team discovered that AI coding assistance can hinder skill development if used incorrectly. In a randomized controlled trial with software developers, participants using AI assistance scored 17% lower on a post-task quiz than those who coded without AI, despite finishing slightly faster. According to the researchers, productivity benefits “…may come at the cost of skills necessary to validate AI-written code if junior engineers’ skill development has been stunted by using AI in the first place.”
OpenAI introduced the Codex app for macOS, a new desktop application that allows developers to run and supervise multiple AI agents in parallel, manage long-running tasks, and collaborate across the full software lifecycle. The release also expands Codex access across ChatGPT plans, increases rate limits, and opens a waitlist for Windows and Linux users.
Over the past week, OpenClaw (formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot) has gone viral as an open-source AI agent that runs locally on users’ systems, autonomously carrying out tasks like managing emails, calendars, and web interactions. OpenClaw’s rapid rise has also fueled attention around Moltbook, a social platform where OpenClaw-powered agents post, comment, and interact with one another on their own, but has also raised questions about the security of AI agents in open environments.
Apple has acquired Israeli AI startup Q.ai for nearly $2 billion, making it the second-largest acquisition in the company’s history, escalating its investment in AI-driven hardware. Q.ai specializes in machine learning and imaging technologies that enable devices to interpret whispered speech, enhance audio in noisy environments, and detect subtle facial muscle activity, skills that would be helpful for AI wearables.
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