GitHub Universe 2026 Sets Agent-Focused Sessions

GitHub has unveiled the program and speaker lineup for GitHub Universe 2026, its annual developer conference, which will be held October 28-29 at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, according to ZDNet Korea. This year's theme is "the agent era, all together," focused on workflows that connect people, development tools and AI agents.

Sessions will feature speakers from GitHub and Microsoft alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia and Figma. A panel on the future of AI-based development brings together Anthropic applied AI architect Kara Phillips, OpenAI Codex product lead Rohan Varma and GitHub staff product manager Kate Catlin.

GitHub staff engineering manager Anjuan Simmons will present a case of running AI agents across more than 50 services, while Microsoft product manager Julia Kasper will explain Copilot's evaluation and optimization system supporting multiple AI models. Jeff An, co-founder and CTO of Momentic, will show how AI agents inspect applications and reproduce unexpected behavior.

Research and security on the agenda

GitHub researcher Cooper Nederhood and staff applied researcher Alejandro Cardenas will present research finding that accumulated past task information can reduce performance. Nick Taylor, developer advocate at Formonium, will demonstrate restricting an AI connected via Model Context Protocol so it can submit code changes but not merge them.

GitHub senior product manager Steve Glass and senior product security engineer Greg Ose will discuss supply chain attacks targeting GitHub Actions and countermeasures.

The program follows GitHub's October 2026 expansion of HydraFusion, which combines AI models according to coding tasks, and its September 2026 expansion of AI coding support for closed networks.