Agents in the Wild Workshop

News

[7/12/2026] Workshop Accepted — The workshop has been accepted by NeurIPS! See you in Sydney!
[6/6/2026] Third Workshop Proposed for NeurIPS 2026 — We are organizing the Third Workshop on Agents in the Wild at NeurIPS 2026, building on our first workshop at ICLR 2026 and second workshop at ICML 2026. Stay tuned for the call for papers!

About

AI agents are being rapidly deployed in the real world — from Claude Code and OpenAI Codex to open-source tools like OpenClaw — yet safety & security research still lags behind. As these systems reason, act, and adapt in open-ended environments, they introduce profound and emerging challenges around safety, security, and trustworthiness that the research community is only beginning to face.

This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners across academia and industry to chart the next steps toward reliable agents that can operate responsibly in the wild. We build on the momentum of our first workshop at ICLR 2026 (237 submissions, over 500 attendees) and our second workshop at ICML 2026 (327 submissions, over 800 anticipated attendees), and this third edition sharpens the agenda around emerging emphases.

Call for Papers

The Third Workshop on Agents in the Wild at NeurIPS 2026 invites submissions from researchers and practitioners exploring how intelligent agents can reason, act, and adapt safely and securely in open-ended real-world environments.

As agentic AI systems grow more capable, their deployment in dynamic, unpredictable settings introduces challenges in safety, security, and general trustworthiness. This workshop aims to spark discussion across academia and industry on methods, benchmarks, and frameworks for building reliable and trustworthy agents that can operate responsibly "in the wild."

Scope

We welcome contributions on a wide range of topics related to AI agents, including but not limited to:

Agent alignment, control, and oversight
Agentic attack surface and defenses
Privacy, robustness, and factuality for agents
Agentic interpretability and fairness
Evaluation and benchmarking agents
Multimodal and computer-use agent safety
Multi-agent coordination and long-horizon reliability
Post-training and adaptation of agents
Agent infrastructure and protocol security
Agent skills and applications
Agent identity and accountability
Broader societal governance considerations

Important Dates

All dates are tentative and subject to change.

Paper Submission Open: August 1, 2026 AoE
Paper Submission Deadline: August 29, 2026 AoE
Paper Notification Deadline: September 29, 2026 AoE
Camera-ready Version Deadline: December 4, 2026 AoE
Workshop Date: December 11 or 12, 2026 (Sydney, Australia)

Submission Guidelines

Format: The workshop will have a single track. Submissions follow the NeurIPS 2026 template (up to 9 pages). References and supplementary materials will not count against the page limit. Each submission will receive at least 3 reviews.

Submission site: Papers will be submitted through the Workshop Submission Portal on OpenReview. The portal link will be posted here with the call for papers. Please be sure to create an OpenReview profile at least two weeks in advance of the paper submission deadline.

Style file: Please format your submission using the NeurIPS 2026 LaTeX style file. A modified template that refers to our workshop will be made available here. Submissions that exceed the page limit may be desk-rejected.

Dual-submission policy: The workshop will adopt a non-archival policy, welcoming ongoing and unpublished work, as well as papers under review or recently accepted at other venues (provided they do not breach dual-submission or anonymity policies of the other venue). We discourage the submission of work previously published at major venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML).

Visibility: Accepted papers will be made public, but rejected submissions and reviews will not.

Double-blind reviewing: Submissions must be fully anonymized. This policy applies to any supplementary or linked material as well, including code. Any papers found to be in violation of this policy may be desk-rejected.

Conflicts of interest: The organizing committee will proactively search for conflicts of interest using the OpenReview profiles of authors and reviewers, ensuring that reviewers are not assigned any submissions from their own organization. Members of the organizing committee will not be involved in the assessment (e.g., acceptance decisions, ethics review, spotlight presentations, and awards) of any submission from the same organization. We will also not accept submissions from workshop organizers or any person having a personal conflict of interest with them.

LLM usage policy: For LLM usage, authors should follow the NeurIPS 2026 Main Track Handbook.

Contact: For any questions, please contact us at agents-in-the-wild-neurips2026@googlegroups.com.

(Tentative) Schedule

All times are local. The schedule is tentative and subject to change.

Morning Session

8:00–8:10	Opening Remarks
8:10–8:40	Invited Talk 1
8:40–9:10	Invited Talk 2
9:10–9:40	Invited Talk 3
9:40–10:40	Poster Session 1
10:40–11:00	Spotlight Presentations
11:00–11:30	Invited Talk 4
11:30–12:00	Invited Talk 5

Afternoon Session

12:00–13:00	Lunch Break
13:00–13:45	Panel Discussion
13:45–14:15	Invited Talk 6
14:15–14:45	Invited Talk 7
14:45–15:45	Poster Session 2
15:45–16:15	Invited Talk 8
16:15–16:45	Invited Talk 9
16:45–17:00	Awards and Closing Remarks