Opening remarks

Jakob Andersson, co-founder and chair of GAIA, opens GAIA Conference 2026, sold out with 1,250 attendees and, for the first time, three tracks. He describes a year in which AI agents became part of everyday software engineering, and the tension that came with it: OpenClaw became the most-starred project on GitHub while reports counted 135,000 exposed instances, and apps built at speed leaked their users’ data.

He sets two realities side by side, companies that expect AI use from everyone and companies where each use case needs central approval, and points to the gap between experts and the public, in the Stanford AI Index 2026, over whether AI helps people do their jobs. With the next phase of the EU AI Act due on 2 August 2026, moving obligations to those who build applications, and Europe building its own foundation models, he asks which future the audience will build.