The following is a list of events of the year 2026 in artificial intelligence, as well as predicted and scheduled events that have not yet occurred.
Events
January 7 January – Character.AI and Google agree to settle multiple lawsuits alleging the companies' chatbots contributed to suicides and mental health harms among minors, including a case brought by a Florida mother. 9 January – xAI limits use of image generation to paid users following the generation of sexually explicit deepfakes. 10 January – Indonesia blocks access to Grok due to nonconsensual sexualised deepfakes. 11 January – Malaysia blocks access to Grok due to nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes. 16 January – The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) blocks Grok in the Philippines due to nonconsensual sexualised deepfakes. 21 January – The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) lifts their ban on Grok. 23 January – Malaysia lifts their ban on Grok.
February 2 February – Indonesia lifts their ban on Grok. 3 February – Ofcom launches an investigation into X. 9 February – OpenAI tests advertisements for ChatGPT in the United States. 13 February – GPT-4o is retired.
March 4 March – The family of Jonathan Gavalas files the first wrongful death lawsuit against Google over its Gemini chatbot, alleging it fostered a delusional dependency that contributed to his death. 24 March – The city of Baltimore sues xAI, accusing its chatbot Grok of generating sexualized images of people without their consent.
April 21 April – Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier launches a criminal investigation into OpenAI. At issue is whether ChatGPT bears responsibility for a shooting at Florida State University the previous year, which the accused had consulted the chatbot about beforehand. 26 April – OpenAI's video generation tool app Sora is shutdown publicly.
May 7 May – European Union Council and European Parliament reach a provisional agreement to streamline artificial intelligence rules. Unspecified date – Google Gemini hacked three companies during a cybersecurity test by an independent company.
June
1 June – Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announces that Florida has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, and AI-chatbot ChatGPT, accusing the chatbot of putting profit over safety. This lawsuit is the first to be filed by a U.S. state against ChatGPT. 30 June – United States lifts export restrictions on Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5.
July 21 July – OpenAI says a combination of its AI models autonomously hacked into Hugging Face's data processing systems, which OpenAI has described as the first known instance of an autonomous cyberattack performed by an AI agent. 28 July – "Pacing the Frontier", an open letter from more than 1,100 employees and executives from AI companies, requested the U.S. government support an international effort to develop "technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development"
August 6 August – The design of novel bacteriophage genome through generative AI is announced, which was used to fight natural bacteriophage-resistant bacteria.
September 4 September – OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra, which it describes as artificial general intelligence. 8 September Meta launches Muse, an AI agent designed to help users complete various daily tasks. OpenAI announces a solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness with a smooth external force, a Millennium Prize Problem in mathematics, causing a priority controversy. 11 September – 28 Fields Medalists publish A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics, an open letter warning against "detrimental" impact on mathematics from AI companies treating unsolved problems as benchmarks without enhancing human understanding. 21 September – The British Columbia government sues OpenAI over the 2026 Tumbler Ridge shooting that killed eight, alleging the shooter used ChatGPT to plan the attack. 24 September OpenAI discontinues the Sora API, ending developer access to the video generation tool. Prime Minister of Australia Anthony Albanese announces that OpenAI agents breached its Medicare system in June. 29 September OpenAI releases GPT-6.1 Sol, while withholding GPT-6.1 Astra due to AI safety concerns. OpenAI launches Dots, a system for personal AI agents. Anthropic publishes a report warning about the capabilities of Z.ai's GLM-5.3 for enabling cyberattacks.
October
5 October – The United States Department of Defense states it has "ceased the use of Anthropic products", including their removal from Palantir's Maven Smart System, following a dispute since January. 6 October Mistral AI publishes the Mistral Large 4, claimed as the world's leading non-Chinese open weights model, topping cybersecurity and legal benchmarks. OpenAI publishes findings on 377 open problems in mathematics, including resolutions of the Kakeya conjecture, and progress on the Riemann hypothesis, Hodge conjecture, and Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.
See also Timeline of artificial intelligence
References