OpenAI Takes DevDay 2026 Global With 8-City Developer Tour

OpenAI just opened applications for DevDay 2026, its annual developer conference, set for September 29 at Fort Mason in San Francisco. This is the fourth edition of the event, and it comes with a notable expansion: for the first time, OpenAI is pairing the flagship conference with a global tour of satellite events called DevDay Exchanges.

What's actually happening

The event will bring developers together in San Francisco for technical sessions, hands-on demos, workshops, and direct access to OpenAI teams building developer tools. The opening keynote will be livestreamed for free, no sign-up required. Other sessions will be recorded and posted on openai.com after the event.

A few key logistics to know:

• Applications are open now, with a deadline of July 10, 2026.
• Accepted applicants will be notified by late July, and will have 14 days to register before their spot is offered to someone on the waitlist.
• Registration costs $650, and a limited number of scholarships are available that may cover registration, travel, and accommodation.
• The event is expected to attract 1,500+ attendees.

Going global for the first time

The biggest structural change this year is the DevDay Exchanges program. Later in 2026, OpenAI will bring DevDay Exchanges to Bengaluru, Tokyo, Seoul, Paris, Berlin, London, São Paulo, and Mexico City. This is a meaningful shift -- previous DevDays were single-city affairs, and the international expansion signals that OpenAI is actively trying to deepen its developer relationships outside the US market.

Why DevDay matters

To understand the stakes of this event, it helps to look at the trajectory. At the first DevDay in 2023, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4 Turbo and Altman shared his vision for a marketplace of AI agents called the GPT Store. In 2024, OpenAI responded with a more subdued conference, announcing meaningful developer upgrades such as an API for AI voice applications.

DevDay 2025 was the breakout edition. By that point, 4 million developers were building with OpenAI (up from 2 million in 2023), 800 million people were using ChatGPT weekly (up from 100 million), and the API was processing 6 billion tokens per minute (up from 300 million). The platform had scaled 20x in under two years, and the announcements matched that energy.

Here's what each edition shipped:

• 2023: GPT-4-Turbo with 128K context, the Assistants API, Custom GPTs, DALL-E 3 API, and multimodal (vision and voice) capabilities.
• 2024: Realtime API, Vision Fine-Tuning, Prompt Caching, and Model Distillation.
• 2025: Apps in ChatGPT via the Apps SDK, AgentKit, Sora 2 in the API, and GPT-5 Pro full rollout.

Every year there has been some excitement about a ChatGPT capability leading into a DevDay, and every year OpenAI has not disappointed by holding back some capability from API release. That pattern has made DevDay one of the most anticipated dates on the AI developer calendar.

The competitive backdrop

OpenAI faces more competition than ever in the bid to win over developers. In the last year, Anthropic's and Google's AI models have become increasingly capable for coding tasks and web design, forcing OpenAI to release better AI models at lower prices to remain in the race. DevDay is partly a retention play -- a way to keep the developer ecosystem invested in the OpenAI platform rather than defecting to alternatives.

The 2025 edition made this strategy explicit. DevDay 2025 unveiled six major releases: the Apps SDK for building native ChatGPT apps, AgentKit with visual Agent Builder and ChatKit for deploying multi-agent workflows, Codex generally available with Slack integration, plus GPT-5 Pro, gpt-realtime-mini, and the Sora 2 API. The message was clear: OpenAI wants to be the full stack, not just the model provider.

What to expect in September

No specific announcements have been confirmed for DevDay 2026 yet. But based on the established pattern, expect the conference to serve as a platform for whatever OpenAI has been quietly building on the API and tooling side. The event historically focuses on unveiling new models, APIs, and tooling for building on the OpenAI platform.

The global Exchanges program is also worth watching closely. Running satellite events in eight cities simultaneously is a logistical and strategic bet that the developer community OpenAI needs to cultivate is no longer concentrated in San Francisco. If the format works, it could become a template for how AI labs engage their ecosystems at scale.

Applications are open at devday.openai.com through July 10. The keynote livestream on September 29 will be free and open to everyone.