Anthropic and OpenAI to appear at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 AI stage

The AI Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, scheduled for October 13–15 in San Francisco, will feature prominent leaders from Anthropic and OpenAI. Cat de Jong of Anthropic and Tara Seshan of OpenAI will address critical shifts in enterprise deployment and the rise of AI-native go-to-market engineering. Additional sessions will bring together experts from Databricks, Okta, AWS, and Decart to tackle the urgent challenges of agentic AI security, SaaS business model transformation, and real-time visual reasoning.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 AI Stage

• ▪The AI Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 will take place from October 13 to October 15, 2026, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
• ▪The TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 AI Stage is presented by Google for Startups and will focus on AI business models, security gaps, and new job categories.

Enterprise AI deployment patterns

• ▪Arsalan Tavakoli, Co-founder and SVP of Field Engineering at Databricks, will discuss enterprise AI security, observability, and governance for autonomous decision-making systems.
• ▪Cat de Jong, the Head of Applied AI at Anthropic, will present on the patterns, successes, and stalls observed when enterprises deploy the Claude AI model.

AI-native go-to-market strategies

• ▪Kareem Amin, Co-founder and CEO of Clay, will present on how AI tools are reshaping growth strategies and driving the rise of the GTM engineer profession.
• ▪Tara Seshan, the Head of Productivity at OpenAI, will discuss AI-native go-to-market strategies and the emergence of the GTM engineering role.

Agentic AI security challenges

• ▪Ric Smith, President of Product & Technology at Okta, will address the limitations of application-level permission models and infrastructure-level requirements for securing agentic AI.
• ▪Chet Kapoor of AWS, Katie Moussouris of Luta Security, and Wendy Nather of 1Password will discuss infrastructure-level security, observability, and governance for enterprise AI environments.

SaaS business model transformation

• ▪The SaaS panel at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 will examine how the commoditization of AI models is forcing companies to rewrite traditional software-as-a-service business playbooks.
• ▪Arvind Jain of Glean, Barr Moses of Monte Carlo, Cathy Gao of Sapphire Ventures, and Aaron Jacobson of NEA will discuss sustainable pricing and building moats in the AI era.

Visual AI advancement

• ▪Dean Leitersdorf, Co-founder and CEO of Decart, and Amit Jain, Co-founder and CEO of Luma AI, will discuss the transition of visual AI from demos to real-time inference and physical reasoning.
• ▪The visual intelligence session at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 will explore what happens when generative video models cross into genuine intelligence.