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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.

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Event date
August 26, 2026
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Sources gathered automatically · September 22, 2026
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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.

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