San Francisco, September 14 — Dreamforce is back, and the city is bracing for its biggest conference of the year. Salesforce’s annual gathering is expected to draw more than 43,000 people to the Moscone Center during the week of Monday, September 14, 2026, with the conference officially starting Tuesday, September 15. Attendees began arriving in San Francisco ahead of the event.
Roads around the Moscone Center were closed, and hotels and restaurants prepared for the influx. Organizers describe it as the city’s largest conference of the year.
AI agents take center stage
Artificial intelligence and AI agents sit at the center of the conference agenda. That focus arrives even as some industry leaders call for slower development of the technology. Among the early arrivals was Scott Stafford, a Dreamforce attendee who said he has attended the conference eight times and is enthusiastic about advances in AI.
“I love the tech. I love Claude.
I use AI all over the place. Salesforce and Claude force are going to be amazing,” Stafford said. Tecla Solari, an attendee who works in the AI industry, traveled from Switzerland.
“We also have AI capital in Switzerland. So, I’m looking forward to what’s coming,” she said.
The slowdown debate
The conference comes as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for an industrywide slowdown in the development of advanced AI capabilities. Yashas Hariprasad, a computer science professor, said of the industry’s stance: “The amazing thing they are saying is they need to slow down the growth of AI and the development of AI.” Hariprasad said concerns surrounding increasingly capable AI systems deserve attention. “Of course it is concerning that they are talking about agentic AI and development of agentic AI.
But I do think there is a need for them to slow down as well,” he said. One of the most anticipated events of the conference is expected to be a conversation between Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, focused on “Advancing the AI Frontier” and its use for business tools.
Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, also described the landscape. The event highlights the tension between rapid commercial adoption of AI and calls from some leaders, including Amodei, for safety measures to catch up. The conference’s scale underscores San Francisco’s role as a hub for AI industry gatherings, while the debate over the pace of development remains a central theme for attendees and speakers.
Watch this space. The shift is already visible in the halls of Moscone Center, and what’s changing on the AI frontier will be the story to follow all week.
