Exploit Summit, a two‑day conference for builders of open, incentive‑driven artificial intelligence on the Bittensor network, will take place at New City Gas in Montreal on September 28–29, 2026. More than 100 independent teams building on Bittensor will gather to present, discuss and debate an alternative to corporate AI development.
The event arrives at a point when frontier AI development has concentrated sharply inside a small number of very well‑capitalised companies. Montreal, by contrast, is one of the cities most closely associated with the academic phase of the deep learning revolution, when the underlying research was conducted largely in the open.
“The question is no longer whether machines can be made intelligent. It is who gets to build the systems that produce that intelligence, and on what terms. We are not claiming to have settled that. We are putting the argument on a stage in a city with a deep history in AI research.” — Etienne Leroy, Director, Opentensor Foundation
The programme is deliberately adversarial. Rather than a schedule of corporate product announcements, the two days are structured around live demonstrations, workshops, head‑to‑head competition and public debate, including debate about whether the model works at all.
Bittensor network and participants
More than 100 subnet teams currently operate on Bittensor, working across AI agents, distributed compute, robotics, quantum computing and drug discovery. Organisers point to a significant Canadian presence among Bittensor’s early contributors and current community. They are explicit that Montreal’s established academic AI institutions are not participants in or endorsers of the network, and that the connection is historical and thematic rather than institutional.
Speakers and logistics
Confirmed speakers include Jacob Steeves, founder of Bittensor and now CEO of Affine; Micaela Bazo, CEO and co‑founder of Metanova Labs, which runs a distributed drug discovery platform; Will Squires and Steffen Cruz of Macrocosmos; Rob Myers, CEO of Manifold Labs; Marcus Graichen, founder of Taostats; and Max Sebti, co‑founder and CEO of Score Technologies. Jean‑Thomas Ledore, a partner at PwC France, joins from outside the ecosystem. The full roster is at https://exploitsummit.com/speakers/.
Exploit is produced by Bittensor Commons, a non‑profit initiative dedicated to the visibility, understanding and adoption of Bittensor. Tickets are available at https://luma.com/exploitsummit26. Media accreditation, advance interviews and demo access are available on request.
Bittensor is a decentralised incentive network designed to coordinate global contributors to build machine intelligence collaboratively rather than behind closed doors. More information is available at https://exploitsummit.com, https://bittensor.com and https://bittensorcommons.org.
