Red Hat Summit 2026

Red Hat Summit 2026 - Day 1 Keynote - The next platform is choiceMay 12, 2026 · 1h 35m · Matt Hicks

Hicks argued that every AI agent runs on Linux and that the winners will be the organizations that make AI work on their own terms. Red Hat showed how it moved an internal agent from frontier models to smaller optimized models layer by layer, announced sovereignty capabilities across OpenShift, RHEL, Ansible and Red Hat AI, and added confidential computing to the Red Hat AI factory with NVIDIA.

Key themes: Open source, Agents, Governance

1. 1"Every AI agent runs on Linux," Hicks said, the open source foundation built over decades
2. 2Red Hat moved an internal agentic system from frontier models to small models layer by layer where they did better
3. 3Managers will be tested on their ability to delegate to AI agents, Hicks said
4. 4New capabilities across OpenShift, RHEL, Ansible and Red Hat AI target data, technology and operational sovereignty
5. 5Red Hat described how agentic coding with Claude Code and Opus 4.5 changed its own engineering
6. 6Confidential computing comes to the Red Hat AI factory with NVIDIA