San Francisco, CA, Oct. 16, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 
Open Intelligence Foundation
Open Source AI Week begins today across the San Francisco Bay Area. The ten-day, community-run celebration of open-source artificial intelligence runs October 16–25, and the Open Intelligence Foundation, a new nonprofit, is the steward of the entire week. More than 60 events hosted by over 200 participating organizations, from startups and research labs to nonprofits and local meetups, will take place throughout the week.
Open Source AI Week is not a single conference. It is a decentralized week of independently hosted events built around one idea: AI should be open, accessible and built by everyone. Any group with an open-source connection can host an event, and four flagship events organized by the Foundation anchor the week.
Flagship events
- Kickoff Party, “Open Together: AI Builders Unite” (Friday, Oct. 16, 6 p.m., The Midway, San Francisco): Presented by Hugging Face and co-hosted by the Open Intelligence Foundation, this kickoff party brings builders, researchers and supporters together to launch the week. Sponsors include Arcee AI and Reflection AI.
- ExecuTorch Hackathon (Oct. 17–18, Founders Inc, San Francisco): Presented by HackerSquad, this hackathon features a weekend of building with open models, local inference and on-device AI, culminating in a Sunday demo night. Sponsors include Meta, Qualcomm, GitHub and the Open Intelligence Foundation.
- The Open Source AI Debates (Monday, Oct. 19, 5–9 p.m., GitHub, San Francisco): Hosted by GitHub and the Open Intelligence Foundation, this event brings together Ion Stoica, Percy Liang, Malo Bourgon, Ben Brooks, Cheryl Cheng and David Bellamy to debate the safety, policy, economic and performance trade-offs of open versus closed AI models. Sponsors include Google DeepMind, Microsoft Azure, Arcee AI, SemiAnalysis and the NEAR Foundation.
- The Open Source AI Awards (Friday, Oct. 23, 5–9 p.m., Founders Inc, San Francisco): Hosted by Founders Inc, OSS4AI and the Open Intelligence Foundation, this event honors the projects and people advancing open-source AI. The awards ceremony will be followed by an evening of networking. Sponsors include Google DeepMind, Arcee AI, Microsoft Azure, SemiAnalysis and the NEAR Foundation.
Community highlights
Many of the week's events are hosted entirely by the community. They cluster around PyTorch Conference (Oct. 20–21) and AGNTCon + MCPCon (Oct. 22–23) in San Jose. A sampling:
Build
- The Recursive Agents Hackathon (Oct. 17, San Francisco): Teams of up to four build persistent agent teams that plan, delegate and recover on their own, competing for $25,000 in prizes. Hosted by Cerebral Valley and Crusoe, with NVIDIA.
- Arm + Meta ExecuTorch: Edge AI Challenge (Oct. 17): A two-day, hands-on hackathon for building and deploying AI apps on Arm-powered devices. Hosted by Arm.
- Cline & Composio Hackathon (Oct. 19): Builders create AI agents and open-source them. Hosted by Cline and Composio.
- Google Gemma Hardware Hackathon (Oct. 24, AGI House, Hillsborough): A builder finale focused on edge and physical AI. Hosted by Google DeepMind and AGI House.
Learn
- Mem-Off! The Open Source AI Memory Showdown (Oct. 17, Pebblebed, San Francisco): Attendees bring their own setup and test AI memory systems side by side. Hosted by Cognee and Claude-Mem.
- Arm Create: Hands-on AI (Oct. 19, The Tech Interactive, San Jose): Practitioners deploy AI from cloud to edge with experts from Arm, Google DeepMind, Renesas and Nota AI.
- Agents Hunting Agents (Oct. 19, Silicon Valley AI Hub, Menlo Park): Mentor-led teams use open-source tooling to spot malicious agent behavior.
- LMCache Meetup + Workshop (Oct. 22): A four-hour, hands-on deep dive into KV cache management and LLM efficiency.
Connect
- OpenClaw and Friends Meetup (Oct. 20): An evening on AI you can own, understand and control. Hosted by the OpenClaw Foundation.
- SGLang x LinkedIn AI Infra Meetup (Oct. 20, LinkedIn, Sunnyvale): Builders talk high-performance open-source model serving.
- AI Safety Night SF (Oct. 20, San Francisco): The series returns after drawing 150+ people to its debut, this time exploring safety as AI moves into physical systems.
- Lessons from Open Source DevTools Founders (Oct. 21, Hogpatch, San Francisco): Founders hold round tables on open source as a go-to-market strategy. Hosted by PostHog and 1984 Ventures.
- Open Source AI + Policy Happy Hour (Oct. 21, GitHub, San Francisco): Policymakers, researchers, industry and civil society discuss an open, secure and competitive AI ecosystem.
- Training Agents IRL (Oct. 22, GitHub, San Francisco): Researchers and builders explore reinforcement learning for agentic systems. Hosted by GitHub and Hugging Face.
- Open Source AI Summit (Oct. 22): A half-day seminar hosted by Buildplanet and co-hosted with the Open Intelligence Foundation and NEAR AI.
Play
- Crusoe Field Day (Oct. 16, Presidio, San Francisco): Teams race their "model" from raw data to production through themed lawn games.
- Overmind Arcade (Oct. 20, Joey the Cat's Arcade, San Francisco): Open-source builders take over an arcade for the night. Find a Player 2 and ask what they're shipping.
- SF AI→SI Code and Coffee (Oct. 25, Salesforce Park, San Francisco): A relaxed Sunday close to the week for hundreds of developers and founders.
Open Source AI Week is built by and for the community, with more than 60 community-led events this year. Organizers across the ecosystem shape the week’s program with talks, panels, workshops, hackathons, demo nights and meetups exploring open models, agentic AI, AI infrastructure, safety, compute and enterprise AI.
“The future of AI should be built by everyone, not controlled by a few. Open models give developers, researchers, and organizations everywhere the freedom to build, innovate, and shape technology on their own terms. Open Source AI Week is a celebration of the incredible community making that future possible. We're kicking things off with Open Together to bring thousands of AI builders together, showcase what they're creating, and show the world that the AI revolution will not be centralized.”
— Jeff Boudier, VP of Product, Hugging Face
“Open-source AI is stronger when its community comes together to share ideas, learn from one another and build lasting connections. This community-run week celebrates the people and projects moving the field forward and invites everyone to join the conversation about what comes next,”
— Matt White, Executive Director of the Open Intelligence Foundation.
Open Source AI Week is supported by platinum sponsor Google DeepMind, gold sponsors Arcee and Microsoft Azure, and bronze sponsors NEAR AI and SemiAnalysis.
Community supporters include a16z, AI2, Anyscale, Black Forest Labs, Fireworks AI, Founders Inc, GitHub, GMI Cloud, Hacker Squad, Hugging Face, Inferact, J.P. Morgan, Laude Institute, LinkedIn, LMSYS, Meta, MiniMax, Mistral AI, Nasiko, Nous Research, Ollama, OpenClaw Foundation, Prime Intellect, Qualcomm, RadixArk, Ray, Reflection AI, SGLang, SkyPilot, The AI Collective, UC Berkeley, Unsloth and vLLM.
How to attend
Events require registration.
The full calendar and RSVP links are at https://www.luma.com/opensourceaiweek
More information is at https://www.opensourceaiweek.com
About Hugging Face
Hugging Face is an AI platform and community dedicated to making machine learning accessible through open source, open science and collaboration. Its tools and platform enable researchers, developers and organizations to discover, create and share models, datasets and AI applications, helping people build on one another’s work. Learn more at huggingface.co.
About the Open Intelligence Foundation
The Open Intelligence Foundation is a community-led, vendor-neutral nonprofit dedicated to protecting and advancing open-source AI, open models and open science. It supports open-source projects and connects researchers, developers, founders and communities with the knowledge, resources and collaborators they need to thrive. As steward of Open Source AI Week, the Foundation celebrates the people and projects building an open AI ecosystem and expands opportunities for everyone to participate. Learn more at openintelligence.foundation.
Media contact
Open Intelligence Foundation - contact@opensourceaiweek.com
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