Agentic AI Weekly | Berkeley RDI | May 20, 2026
Agentic AI Summit Early Bird Tickets and Expanded Speaker List, AgentX–AgentBeats Phase 2, Sprint 3 Winners + Sprint 4 Deadline Approaching, Berkeley Xcelerator Spring Cohort Announced
Agentic AI Summit 2026 (More Featured Speakers Announced, Early-Bird Pricing Ending Soon, and Limited Number of 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 (very few student tier tickets left; ensure you buy your tickets as soon as possible before they sell out!)
Standard Early-Bird: $399
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 Deadline this Sunday!
Phase 2, Sprint 4 of the AgentX–AgentBeats competition is now underway, and the deadline is approaching quickly! For this final sprint, all submissions are due by this Sunday, May 24th, and we can’t wait to see all of your great projects! The submission form for Sprint 4 is open, 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+
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!
Phase 2, Sprint 3 Winners Announced!
We’re excited to recognize the winning teams of Phase 2, Sprint 3. We saw so many strong submissions this sprint, so thank you to all who submitted their agents!
Winning Teams:
Agent Safety
🥇 1st Place (Tie): durga-sandeep/safetyagent (Pi-Bench)
🥇 1st Place (Tie): Pegasus (Pi-Bench)
Coding Agent
🥇 1st Place: AgentWhetters (SWE-bench Pro)
🥈 2nd Place (Tie): AgentSWE (Terminal Bench 2.0)
🥈 2nd Place (Tie): Purple Terminal Agent (Terminal Bench 2.0)
Cybersecurity Agent
🥇 1st Place: Pegasus (CyberGym)
🥈 2nd Place: AgentWhetters (CyberGym)
Berkeley Xcelerator 2026 Spring Cohort Announced!
We are excited to announce the selected startups for the Berkeley Xcelerator, an initiative designed to help founders turn breakthrough ideas into scalable, venture‑backable companies that shape the future of intelligent systems.
Startups Selected for the 2026 Spring Cohort:
Narada AI
Agentic automation platform using Large Action Models to automate complex enterprise workflows end-to-end.
Cognee
Ontology-grounded context engine for your agents, enabling them to reason and improve over time.
Nimblemind
AI agents for healthcare data interoperability, automating feature extraction from multi-modal healthcare data.
Headroom
The context optimization layer for LLM agents, cutting tokens 40-90% losslessly across text, voice, and regulated verticals.
RELAI
Lifelong optimization engine for AI agents that turns production failures into replayable test environments.
AgntID
Access Control Enforcement for AI Agents.
Founding Dev
Replace your SaaS stack with software you own.
ArmorIQ
AI agent security platform that enforces intent-based policy at the reasoning-to-execution boundary.
Congratulations to all of the selected startups, and thank you to all who applied for the 2026 Spring Cohort! In addition, we want to thank our wonderful partners who are helping make the Berkeley Xcelerator possible:
Trends This Week
OpenAI launched a new personal finance experience in ChatGPT this past week, allowing ChatGPT Pro users in the U.S. to connect their financial accounts and ask natural-language questions about spending, savings, subscriptions, portfolio performance, and long-term financial planning. The feature uses Plaid to connect with more than 12,000 financial institutions, including Chase, Fidelity, Schwab, Robinhood, and Capital One. The launch comes one month after OpenAI acquired the team behind Hiro, a personal finance startup. OpenAI says that more than 200 million users already ask financial questions to ChatGPT each month and noted that GPT-5.5’s stronger contextual reasoning capabilities were important for handling finance-related queries. The feature is currently available on web and iOS for ChatGPT Pro users in the U.S., with broader rollout plans expected after additional testing and feedback.
xAI launched an early beta of Grok Build this past week, introducing a new coding agent and terminal-based CLI designed for software engineering and development workflows. Grok Build is positioned as a competitor to AI coding tools such as Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, with capabilities focused on code generation, workflow planning, shell command execution, and multi-step engineering tasks directly from the terminal. According to xAI, Grok Build supports parallelized task execution through subagents, plugin integrations, and local-first development workflows. The company described the release as an early beta test and said it plans to refine both the product and underlying models based on developer feedback as adoption expands.
Google-backed Isomorphic Labs raised $2.1 billion in a Series B funding round this past week, marking one of the largest AI healthcare investments of the year. The round was led by Thrive Capital and included participation from Alphabet, Google DeepMind’s parent company. Founded in 2021 by Demis Hassabis — the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind and a 2024 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold — the company develops AI systems for drug discovery and molecular design. Isomorphic said the new funding will be used to scale its AI drug-design engine, accelerate internal drug programs into clinical trials, and expand partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly and Novartis.
Anthropic announced a new push into the small business market this past week with the launch of Claude for Small Business, a suite of AI tools and integrations aimed at smaller companies and local business operators. The offering expands Anthropic’s Claude Cowork platform, which supports task automation, file management, web browsing, and multistep workflows, with features tailored toward bookkeeping, business insights, marketing content generation, and operational assistance. The new product includes integrations with software platforms, including QuickBooks, Canva, DocuSign, HubSpot, and PayPal. Anthropic said the initiative is designed to address lower AI adoption rates among small and mid-sized businesses, which collectively account for a significant share of U.S. employment and GDP.
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