Atlas record: https://www.aitimeline.dev/en/events/evt-0360/
Announcement · August 26, 2026
AGI by the end of the year
Sam Altman said that by the end of 2026 OpenAI would have an internal system he would call general intelligence; the company's chief research officer put progress at 80 per cent of the way.
Why it matters
A date was named, and that is why this record exists: it is a claim that can later be checked rather than merely judged.
Altman qualified it as his own definition and tied it to the Astra model: "I expect this will be the first model where the model actually invents new things in a way that matters. That's a very AGI-like thing." The term has no agreed definition, so the claim can be neither confirmed nor refuted without first agreeing a criterion, and that is its character. The atlas records such statements not as a fact about systems but as a dated fact about what the people building them said. In the same year the interactive ARC-AGI-3 test gave frontier models 0.51 per cent against a human 100.
Event record
- Event date
- August 26, 2026
- Timeline date
- Event date
- Verification
- Sources gathered automatically · September 22, 2026
- ID
- evt-0360
The interview was published on 26 August 2026; the TIME original refuses automated requests with 406, so the quotation is taken from a secondary account.
Related events
Earlier
- Related ARC-AGI-3 and 0.51 per cent 2026
In the same year an interactive test gave frontier models 0.51 per cent.
- Related SAI: adaptation speed instead of AGI 2026links to this record
Altman names a date for “general intelligence” by his own definition; the paper says the word “general” is what misleads here, and proposes measuring the speed of adaptation.
- Related Amodei names a term: powerful AI in one to two years 2026links to this record
The second named term of the year from the head of a frontier lab, seven months earlier.
- Related o3 on ARC-AGI 2024
The claim came after the test built as a limit was taken, and the next one proved impassable again.