OpenAI DevDay 2026 will be held in San Francisco on 9/29

OpenAI’s official announcement on April 29 states that the flagship developer conference DevDay 2026 will be held on September 29 in San Francisco, returning to an in-person format after many years. It also announced a submission campaign: developers use GPT-5.5 and Image Gen to create works and submit them. Each week, Codex will select 2-3 creative submissions, and the winners receive free DevDay tickets (including cross-city airfare and hotel expenses).

Conference theme: the developer ecosystem built around GPT-5.5 + Image Gen

The core application stack for this DevDay is clearly centered on GPT-5.5. GPT-5.5 went live on April 23 and its API was fully opened on April 24. Around the end of April, alongside this, GPT-5.4 Pro delivered concrete results in both bioinformatics and mathematics research scenarios (the most talked-about was on 4/28, when 23-year-old amateur researcher Liam Price solved the long-standing Erdős conjecture #1196 using GPT-5.4 Pro). OpenAI scheduled DevDay about five months after these two developments, giving the developer community enough time to accumulate application cases based on the new model—an example of a classic “release the model first, then hold the big event” timeline design.

The submission campaign is also notable. Submissions are automatically filtered by Codex, effectively embedding OpenAI’s code-agent product into the event’s judging logic. This design serves two purposes: it publicly showcases Codex’s capabilities, and it makes “human-AI collaborative judging” the implied underlying thread of DevDay.

Eligibility and what to watch next

Official rules for the submission campaign: participants must be at least 18 years old; OpenAI employees and contracted partners, along with their direct family members, are not allowed to participate. There will be one draw each week, and the draw period continues until before DevDay’s opening. The specific registration process and judging criteria will be published on OpenAI’s event page.

For the global developer community, this DevDay marks OpenAI’s first return to an in-person conference after the 2024 event (in 2025 it switched to an online program). Key things to watch include: whether a new next-generation flagship model (GPT-6 or a successor to GPT-5.5) will be announced in September; whether agent products such as Codex and ChatGPT Workspace Agents will have further integrations; and OpenAI’s concrete deployment plans for its cloud partnerships with Microsoft and Amazon (after the April 27 agreement was renewed, OpenAI can operate across multiple cloud services).

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