Agentic AI Weekly | Berkeley RDI | May 6, 2026
Agentic AI Summit Early Bird Tickets and Expanded Speaker List, Sponsor Opportunities, and AgentX–AgentBeats Phase 2, Sprint 4 Underway
Agentic AI Summit 2026 (More Featured Speakers Announced, Early-Bird Pricing Ending Soon, and Limited Number of Student Tickets Left!)
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!
In addition, we are excited to showcase our expanded list of speakers for the Summit! We are honored to have such a great group of academics, founders, executives, and investors participate in this year’s event, and more will be announced soon!
🎟️ Early‑Bird Pricing (Limited Capacity)
A limited number of early‑bird tickets are still available:
Student Early-Bird: $199 (Less than 50 tickets are remaining for students; ensure you buy your tickets as soon as possible before they sell out!)
Standard Early-Bird: $299 (Less than 100 tickets remaining!)
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.
Sponsorship Opportunities
Partner with us to shape the future of Agentic AI. If you’re interested in sponsoring the summit, please complete the sponsorship application form. Sponsorship opportunities are limited and reviewed/allocated on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early.
AgentX–AgentBeats Highlights: Phase 2, Sprint 4 is Underway!
Phase 2, Sprint 4 of the AgentX–AgentBeats competition is now underway! For this final sprint, all submissions are due by Sunday, May 24th, and we can’t wait to see all of your great projects! We’ve opened the submission form for Sprint 4, which you can access by clicking the button below!
For Phase 2, participants are building purple agents to tackle the select top green agents from Phase 1 and compete on the public leaderboards. Unlike Phase 1, where participants competed across all tracks throughout the entire duration, Phase 2 introduces a sprint-based format. The competition is organized into four rotating sprints.
Sprint 4 Details:
Deadline: May 24, 2026
The 4th Sprint is the grand finale of AgentX-AgentBeats, focused on general-purpose agents. While earlier sprints emphasized depth within specific tracks, Sprint 4 emphasizes breadth: strong, consistent performance across many green agents, benchmarks, and evaluation categories. Sprint 4 includes all green agents from the first three Phase 2 sprints, plus additional selected benchmarks introduced for this final sprint:
Game Agent: Build What I Mean; Minecraft Benchmark
Finance Agent: OfficeQA
Business Process Agent: DeoGaze / Entropic CRMArena
Research Agent: FieldWorkArena; MLE-Bench; Mind2Web 2; BrowseComp+ (coming soon)
Multi-agent Evaluation: MAizeBargAIn
τ²-Bench: τ²-Bench
Computer Use & Web Agent: CAR-bench; OSWorld-Verified
Agent Safety: Pi-Bench
Coding Agent: SWE-bench Pro; Terminal Bench 2.0; NetArena
Cybersecurity Agent: CyberGym
To be eligible for Sprint 4 judging, a team must evaluate its purple agent on at least 5 green agents spanning at least 3 distinct categories. Teams are strongly encouraged to go beyond this minimum; broader coverage across more green agents and more categories will be viewed favorably.
Judging will reward purple agents that demonstrate strong cross-benchmark performance, category diversity, generality, cost efficiency, and technical quality. A strong Sprint 4 submission should show that the same purple-agent architecture can adapt across substantially different task types without benchmark-specific hardcoding or special-case lookup tables.
Participants are encouraged to compete in multiple tracks across multiple sprints during Phase 2. Teams and team members who submit purple agents in any sprint will also be eligible to enter a raffle for free tickets to the Agentic AI Summit later this year.
For more details on each sprint and how to compete in Phase 2, please refer to the AgentX–AgentBeats website!
Trends This Week
OpenAI and Anthropic both launched joint ventures over the past week to accelerate enterprise adoption of their AI systems. “The Deployment Company,” OpenAI’s joint venture, raised more than $4 billion from leading private equity firms and is valued at roughly $10 billion. OpenAI retains majority ownership and operational control, with the venture focused on enterprise-scale deployment, integration, and sustained usage of OpenAI’s systems. Anthropic announced a similarly positioned venture with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs, backed by approximately $1.5 billion, aimed at embedding its Claude models directly into core business operations. The firm will include integrated Anthropic engineering resources and leverage partner networks to scale deployments across enterprise portfolios.
This past week, OpenAI renegotiated its flagship partnership with Microsoft, while expanding its infrastructure reach through a new agreement with Amazon Web Services. The revised Microsoft deal removes exclusivity, introduces non-exclusive IP licensing, enables multi-cloud deployment, and caps revenue-sharing terms through 2030, allowing OpenAI to offer its models and products across multiple cloud providers. OpenAI then announced, as part of its new agreement with AWS, that its latest models will be available through Amazon Bedrock, alongside tools such as its Codex coding agent and managed agent-building capabilities. These offerings allow enterprises to access OpenAI’s models, develop software, and build production-ready AI agents directly within existing AWS environments using Bedrock’s infrastructure, controls, and APIs.
Enterprise AI startup Sierra—co-founded by OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor—has raised approximately $950 million in a new funding round, valuing the company at roughly $15–16 billion. Prior to this, the company was valued at about $10 billion following a $350 million raise in 2025, and $4.5 billion after a $175 million round in 2024. Sierra builds AI-powered customer service agents for enterprises and has reported approximately $150 million in annual recurring revenue, using a multi-model approach that combines external foundation models with its own software layer.
DeepSeek released a preview of its V4 model family, introducing DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash as its latest open-weight systems. V4-Pro uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with 1.6 trillion total parameters and is positioned to compete with leading closed-source models across reasoning, coding, and world knowledge benchmarks, while V4-Flash offers a smaller, faster, and more cost-efficient alternative with 284 billion total parameters. The release also includes support for deployment on Huawei Ascend chips, with the models trained in part on Huawei hardware rather than relying solely on Nvidia GPUs.
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