GitHub Universe 2026 Schedule: Dates, Price and How to Watch

GitHub Universe 2026 is locked in for October 28–29, 2026 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, with the full session schedule now live at githubuniverse.com, as GitHub's own event guide confirms. In-person passes run $1,399 (team pricing drops to $1,119 per pass for groups of four or more), while a free virtual pass gets anyone a livestream of both keynotes, exclusive online-only programming, and on-demand access to recorded sessions. With the event now roughly three weeks away, GitHub has also confirmed the headline themes: agentic coding, a reworked GitHub Copilot that leans toward delegation over prompting, and — notably — a dedicated focus on securing hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Every figure below traces back to GitHub's own event site or GitHub's own blog, not secondhand coverage.

When and where is GitHub Universe 2026?

GitHub's flagship developer conference returns to the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco for a two-day main program on Wednesday, October 28, and Thursday, October 29, 2026. The event site describes it as "GitHub's flagship developer event uniting humans, agents, and the world's code to build what's next," run in-person and virtually at the same time.

The schedule actually spans four days once the surrounding programming is counted. Tuesday, October 27 is an invite-only "Day 0," and Friday, October 30 is a separate, ticketed Day of Learning at GitHub's own headquarters — which GitHub's event site already lists as sold out. GitHub's companion announcement post, "GitHub Universe is back: All together now, in the agentic era," describes Universe as a gathering for "builders, maintainers, security practitioners, technical leaders, and partners" coming together for "two days of learning, product exploration, and collaboration" — language GitHub has used to frame the event as bigger than a product launch.

Key dates at a glance

GitHub has not published exact keynote run-of-show beyond the start times above, but it describes the opening keynote as covering "latest product announcements, live demos, and maybe a few surprises," with a specific emphasis on "AI and agents as true accelerators" alongside updates on GitHub's wider ecosystem.

How to register: in-person vs. the free online option

Registration for every pass type runs through githubuniverse.com. GitHub's own pricing breakdown lists:

GitHub's site currently flags in-person passes as "selling fast," so anyone planning to attend on-site should register sooner rather than later. The virtual pass is the one genuinely free way to watch: it includes live access to both keynotes plus on-demand replays of breakout sessions once GitHub publishes them after the event.

GitHub is also running "Universe on the Road" this year — satellite meetups in other cities for developers who want an in-person element without flying to San Francisco, aimed at people who "can't make it in October" to the main campus but still want to connect with a local developer community.

What's on the agenda

Beyond the two keynotes, GitHub's published guide describes a packed breakout schedule running most of both days (10:00 AM–5:30 PM on day one, 9:00 AM–2:00 PM on day two), plus several newer programming formats for 2026:

• Ship & Tell — short, lightning-talk-style sessions where teams walk through something they actually built and shipped.
• Speaker After Parties in "GitHub Central," giving attendees informal access to session speakers after their talks.
• A Discussions Lounge powered by Braindate, for structured peer-to-peer conversations on topics attendees pick themselves.
• An expanded open-source showcase area GitHub is calling "The Source."

Sponsored evening events run on the night of October 28, and GitHub's site notes that partner booths will offer "interactive demos and practical solutions" throughout both days.

Headline theme: AI-powered and agentic development

The throughline across this year's confirmed sessions is agentic software development — tools that don't just autocomplete code but independently plan, execute, and report back on multi-step engineering work. GitHub's own Universe 2026 guide frames the shift explicitly, describing the event as covering everything "from writing code to managing agents" and highlighting sessions on scaling AI agents across dozens of services, where agents "classify issues, research codebases, [and] write implementation plans" before a human ever reviews the work.

That framing extends to GitHub's own event copy, which bills Universe 2026 around the idea that "builders become orchestrators" — developers increasingly supervising fleets of agents rather than writing every line themselves. It's a notable escalation from previous years' Universe events, which focused more on Copilot as an in-editor autocomplete and chat assistant.

GitHub Copilot: from prompting to delegating

GitHub Copilot sessions make up a large share of the confirmed schedule, and the common thread is delegation rather than prompting. GitHub's guide to the event lists a session from GitHub's own Ken Muse and Mickey Gousset titled "Stop prompting, start delegating: Configure Copilot to own the work," alongside a session from Microsoft's Julia Kasper on "Inside GitHub Copilot's coding harness" and one from GitHub's Sameen Karim on "Stop waiting on your own pull requests." Collectively, the sessions GitHub has published point toward Copilot being pitched less as a chat window and more as a background worker that takes on full tasks.

That direction tracks with recent changes to Copilot's own model lineup and tooling, which Pandromeda covered in detail after October's round of model deprecations, and with Copilot's expanding computer-use capabilities, which we've also broken down separately. Universe 2026 looks set to be where GitHub ties those threads — model choice, autonomous execution, and delegation workflows — together into one coherent pitch, building on the Copilot product line GitHub has been expanding all year.

MCP security takes center stage

One of the more pointed additions to this year's schedule is a session specifically on securing the Model Context Protocol — the open standard that lets AI models and coding agents call out to external tools and data sources. GitHub's own event guide lists a session on "Fine-grained authorization for hosted MCP servers," covering per-identity authorization for MCP deployments, a sign that GitHub is treating MCP security as its own distinct problem rather than an afterthought to agentic coding.

That focus follows GitHub's own recent engineering work on its hosted MCP server, including a changelog update covering new projects, tools, and OAuth scope filtering for the GitHub MCP Server earlier this year. For readers who want the fundamentals first, Pandromeda has a separate explainer on how MCP works under the hood — useful background before diving into a security-specific session at the event itself. It's also a sign of where the wider ecosystem is heading: as more agents get wired up to more MCP servers inside real companies, "who's allowed to call what" stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the thing that decides whether a security team signs off on agentic coding at all.

Confirmed speakers and partner companies

GitHub's official "Featured Speakers" list for Universe 2026 currently includes Jenny Patchen of Levi Strauss & Co., GitHub's own Martin Woodward, Angie Jones of the Agentic AI Foundation, Franck Nijhof of the Open Home Foundation, Julio Arruda of GFT Technologies, Bea Mendez Gandica of the Nuevo Foundation, John Maeda of Microsoft, and GitHub's Mario Rodriguez.

GitHub's published session guide also names sessions tied to AMD, Figma, NVIDIA, Coinbase, Anthropic, OpenAI, Pomerium, the Linux Foundation, and the Django Software Foundation — spanning hardware makers, model providers, open-source foundations, and enterprise customers, which GitHub frames as reflecting Universe's audience of "builders, maintainers, security practitioners, technical leaders, and partners."

The mix matters as much as the names. Having AMD and NVIDIA on the same bill as Anthropic and OpenAI signals GitHub positioning Universe as model- and hardware-agnostic rather than tied to any single AI provider, while enterprise names like Coinbase, UPS, and Levi Strauss & Co. point to sessions grounded in production use cases rather than purely experimental demos. Open-source foundations showing up alongside corporate sponsors — the Linux Foundation, the Django Software Foundation, the Open Home Foundation — also tracks with GitHub's stated push to expand "The Source," its open-source showcase area, this year.

Universe on the Road and the Day of Learning

Two pieces of this year's event sit outside the main San Francisco dates. "Universe on the Road" brings satellite gatherings to additional cities for developers who want a local, in-person element without traveling to Fort Mason Center — GitHub pitches it as a way to "connect with your local developer community" while still getting the gist of what's new. Separately, the Day of Learning on October 30 is a smaller, ticketed day at GitHub's own headquarters built around live demos and direct access to GitHub staff; as of publication, GitHub's site lists that ticket as sold out, so it's one date on the calendar that latecomers won't be able to buy into.

What developers should watch for

Based on GitHub's own published agenda, a few things are worth tracking once the event starts: what GitHub actually ships during the opening keynote on October 28 (GitHub has said to expect "product announcements" and "live demos," without pre-announcing specifics); how far the delegation framing in Copilot sessions translates into concrete product changes rather than talk-track positioning; and whether the MCP authorization session results in any changelog-level follow-up for GitHub's hosted MCP server, given GitHub has already been shipping OAuth scope and tooling changes to that server ahead of the event. Developers who can't attend in person should plan around the free virtual pass specifically for the two keynote windows (9:00 AM PT on October 28, 2:00 PM PT on October 29), since that's the one piece of programming GitHub has committed to streaming live rather than only posting on demand afterward. It's also worth watching whether GitHub extends any of the Universe 2026 announcements into same-day or same-week changelog posts, which is how GitHub has historically turned keynote demos into shipped, usable features rather than slideware.

What's next

With the full schedule now published, the near-term milestones are straightforward: in-person passes continue selling at $1,399 (GitHub's own site already flags them as moving quickly), the free virtual pass remains open for registration at githubuniverse.com, and the Day of Learning add-on is already sold out. Expect GitHub to begin publishing more granular session-by-session detail — exact rooms, extended speaker bios, and possibly additional confirmed talks — on the official site as October 28 approaches, along with the usual post-event recap and on-demand session library once the keynotes wrap on October 29.

Written byFelix Moreau

Felix Moreau writes Pandromeda's software coverage and how-to guides. He covers Windows, macOS and Linux updates, the apps people rely on, emulators and developer tools, and turns official documentation into clear, numbered steps that work on the current version.

More from Felix MoreauAll Software & Guides coverage