AO Commons

Stanford
AO Summit

Date30–31 July 2026Dinner on Thursday, talks on Friday
LocationStanford, CAStanford campus
Watch the recordingsSee the agenda

Convening researchers and builders shaping the field of autonomous organizations.

Hosted by Stanford OpenLab, the Stanford AO Summit brought together researchers and builders working on autonomous organizations (AO). Examples of AOs range from agent swarms to vending machines to AI villages to DAOs. But the field is just starting to develop the theory, benchmarks, and playbooks for this new class of organizations.

Agenda

Times are Pacific Time. Every session was recorded.

Thursday, 30 JulyEvening · dinner and talk

  1. Dinner

    James Evans, 10-minute talk · Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago

Friday, 31 JulyMain programme · 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM

  1. Breakfast

  2. Welcome and opening

    Joshua Tan · CTO, Current AI and Associate, Stanford OpenLab

    Watch

  3. Axel Wennström

    Cafe, Store, Radio, and More: Lessons from Launching Some of the World's First AI-Run Businesses

    Member of Technical Staff, Andon Labs

    Watch

  4. Roundtable: Autonomous Organizations in the Wild

    Agent collectives actually operating: what breaks, what emerges, and what it's like to work alongside them.

    Lightning talks followed by plenary discussion

    • Apolinário Passos · Head of ML for Art & Creativity, Hugging FaceSymbients: growing autonomous entities without central control
    • Helena Rong · Assistant Professor, NYU ShanghaiMulti-Agent Workspaces in the Wild: Case Study on Raft, Where AI Agents Are Your Co-Workers
    • Adam Binksmith · Director, AI VillageTales from the AI Village
    Watch

  5. Coffee break

  6. Dotta

    The Self-Improving Organization: Defining Good Enough

    CEO, Paperclip

    Watch

  7. Joel Z Leibo

    Cooperation Beyond the Matrix

    Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

    Watch

  8. Lunch

  9. Roundtable: Measuring Autonomy, Benchmarks & the Science of Coordination

    How do you actually evaluate an AO? Metrics, benchmarks, and the science of coordination.

    Lightning talks followed by plenary discussion

    • Rakshit Trivedi · Postdoctoral Researcher, MIT & Harvard UniversitySolipsistic Superintelligence is Unlikely to be Cooperative
    • Hao Zhu · Postdoctoral Scholar, StanfordCooperBench: Measuring the Curse of Coordination in Multi-Agent Cooperation
    • Sam Pasupalak · Co-founder & CEO, Skyfall AITowards Autonomous Enterprises: Morpheus, a Bigworld Benchmark for Continual Learning
    • Yankai Wang · PhD Student, Stanford GSBLearning the Grammar of Coordination with Generative Transformers
    Watch

  10. Roundtable: Openness, Institutions & Society

    Where AOs meet humans: open ecosystems, personal AI, and the institutions around them.

    Lightning talks followed by plenary discussion

    • Allison Duettmann · President & CEO, Foresight InstituteHow & why open source, open science in the age of AI
    • Alex “Sandy” Pentland · Faculty Lead, Stanford Digital Economy LabPersonal AI that protects and helps: Diamond Age made Real
    • Joseph Low · Senior Software Engineer, Change.orgDelegating Deliberation to AI Representatives
    Watch

  11. Break

  12. Alex Obadia

    Standing up the Scaling Trust Arena: a real, physical economy where AI-run companies trade, compete, and earn revenue from real customers, while red teams attack them.

    Programme Director, ARIA

    Watch

  13. Plenary discussion

    Where does the field of autonomous organizations go next?

    Watch

  14. End

Continue in London

The conversation continues at the London AO Summit on 5–6 November 2026, co-hosted by AO Commons and ARIA's Scaling Trust programme.

London AO Summit