AI in 2026

Updated 2026-10-21 · 57 events · 10 marked as defining · compiled from my research notes

The year in five lines

  1. Personal agents went from one person’s weekend project to a whole category: OpenClaw led, every big lab followed by autumn.
  2. The security bill came due too: CVEs, malicious skills and leaks, all year, no pause.
  3. The strongest models increasingly ship open weights, and most of those come from Chinese labs.
  4. Capability up, products down: Sora and Atlas shut, their powers folded back into the main apps.
  5. MCP grew from a developer toy into infrastructure — that is the quiet reason agents took off this year.

Before

2025

  • 2025-07-22NousResearch/hermes-agent repo created (it took off in Feb 2026)
  • 2025-10-21OpenAI launches the Atlas AI browser (Mac only)
  • 2025-11Peter Steinberger releases a personal AI agent as Clawdbot; Google releases Gemini 3
  • 2025-11-24openclaw/openclaw repo created
  • 2025-12MCP donated to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation (co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI)

January

3 events

  • Jan 25 OpenClaw officially launches; third-party counts put it at ~9,000 stars in a dayUnverified
  • Jan 27 After an Anthropic trademark complaint, Clawdbot briefly becomes Moltbot
  • Jan 30 The project settles on the name OpenClaw Personal agents get an open-source reference that everyone installs.

February

6 events

  • Feb 2 HKU’s HKUDS releases nanobot (pip install and go)
  • Feb 3 CVE-2026-25253 (ClawBleed, CVSS 8.8) disclosed Patched on Jan 29. The first high-severity agent bug to reach a general audience.
  • Feb 5 Kuaishou releases Kling 3.0, topping text-to-video leaderboards
  • Feb 11 Zhipu releases GLM-5 (744B/40B, MIT)
  • Feb 14 Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI
  • Month Snyk audit: 36.82% of skills on ClawHub and skills.sh have security flaws; Hermes Agent goes public

March

2 events

  • Month Official MCP SDKs hit 97M monthly downloads; 138+ related CVEs from Feb to Apr, 7 critical
  • Mar 29 CVE-2026-32922 (CVSS 9.9) disclosed

April

7 events

  • Apr 2 Alibaba Qwen3.6-Plus (closed)
  • Apr 7 Zhipu GLM-5.1
  • Apr 16 Qwen3.6-35B-A3B released open
  • Apr 20 Moonshot Kimi K2.6 (1T/32B, open)
  • Apr 23 OpenAI GPT-5.5
  • Apr 24 DeepSeek V4-Pro / V4-Flash preview
  • Apr 26 OpenAI shuts down the Sora web app and mobile app The first flagship product pulled back; OpenAI starts leaving video.

June

2 events

  • Jun 12 Kimi K2.7 Code (coding model, open)
  • Jun 13 Zhipu GLM-5.2 (MIT, 91.2% on GPQA Diamond)

July

5 events

  • Month OpenClaw Foundation formed (US nonprofit); Figure 03 line reaches one robot per hour
  • Jul 9 GPT-5.6 (Sol / Terra / Luna) generally available
  • Jul 16 Moonshot releases Kimi K3 (2.8T MoE), with open weights on Jul 26 Billed as the largest open model; the open-weights movement’s defining moment.
  • Jul 28 New MCP spec: a stateless core that runs on ordinary HTTP infrastructure
  • Jul 31 DeepSeek V4-Flash final release

August

7 events

  • Aug 5 Demis Hassabis steps down as DeepMind CEO to become chairman and chief scientist
  • Aug 8 Unitree lists in Shanghai, peaking near $66B on day one Public markets price embodied AI for the first time.
  • Aug 9 OpenAI shuts down Atlas, folding it into ChatGPT desktop and a Chrome extension The standalone AI browser loses to the extension.
  • Aug 11 xAI Grok Bot beta (macOS/iOS): agent squads plus live X data
  • Aug 14 Zhipu GLM-5.3; Qwen3.8-27B (Apache 2.0)
  • Aug 26 GLM-5.3-Flash; Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (Qwen4 architecture preview)
  • Month Qwen3.8-Max (closed flagship, 2.4T/95B); Claude for Chrome opens to all paid users

September

16 events

  • Sep 1 Anthropic’s top tier: Fable 5.1 / Mythos 5.1
  • Sep 2 Moonshot files confidentially for a Hong Kong IPO
  • Sep 3 OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra ($10 / $50 per million tokens) The new flagship, and the year’s priciest tier.
  • Sep 8 Meta launches Muse, a personal agent (US 18+, free / $20 / $100) Big tech formally enters personal agents.
  • Sep 10 DeepSeek V4.1-Flash released (MIT)
  • Sep 10 DeepSeek V4.1-Pro confirmed to existNot shipped
  • Sep 15 TypeSafe’s Jev leaves two years of stealth with early access
  • Sep 16 Muse calling beta (US) adds AI phone calls
  • Sep 21 Zhipu GLM-5.3-FlashX
  • Sep 22 GPT-6 Sol / Luna; Claude Opus 5.5
  • Sep 22 Qwen says Qwen4 is in trainingNot shipped
  • Sep 24 OpenAI shuts the Sora API, leaving it with no video product
  • Sep 28 Claude Sonnet 5.5; Manus 2.0 ships Cue, giving each agent its own inbox, phone, wallet and computer
  • Sep 29 OpenAI DevDay: GPT-6.1 Sol, the always-on agent dots, Decisions API; ChatGPT passes 1.2B weekly users The biggest player makes the always-on agent the default shape.
  • Sep 30 Google Gemini 4 Argon in limited release (security partners first)
  • Month Google builds Gemini directly into Chrome

October

9 events

  • Oct 6 Brett Adcock’s Hark Labs launches Hark Pro, a proactive personal assistant
  • Oct 7 Claude Haiku 5.5
  • Oct 8 Google ships enterprise Gemini agents that run for hours to days, retiring Gemini Code Assist
  • Oct 12 OpenCode 2.0 becomes a background service; Meta ships the Muse Wonder coding model; Claude Code 2.1 forks subagents by default
  • Oct 13 Gemini 4 Argon opens to the paid API and Google AI Pro / Ultra Google, behind for half the year, retakes the headlines.
  • Oct 14 xAI releases Grok Voice 3.0 (phone agent, $0.08/min)
  • Oct 17 DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 update
  • Oct 19 MiniMax M3.1 Flash ($0.15 / $0.60, 1M context), after 200T+ tokens anonymously as “Space Bunny”
  • Month NVIDIA reportedly weighing another $1B in Figure (The Information; unconfirmed)Unverified

“Unverified” means a single or third-party source; “Not shipped” means only officially confirmed to exist. Vendor claims are not treated as fact. Spotted a mistake? Tell me