Adobe releases After Effects 26.5 and sends its agentic AI assistant to beta

Adobe has released After Effects 26.5 — an update to its compositing, motion graphics and post-production package. It contains no major new features: the release is devoted to the performance of existing tools and to workflow convenience. In parallel, the company shipped a separate beta build in which an agentic AI assistant has appeared: you describe a task to it in text, it carries the task out in the project and reports on its progress in a text log.

After Effects has become yet another Adobe application with such an assistant — similar features arrived in beta in Photoshop and Premiere Pro in June.

Object Matte gets disk caching

Object Matte is the AI-based automatic rotoscoping tool added in After Effects 26.2. In version 26.5 it supports disk caching: the result is preserved even after the project is closed, so there is no need to recompute the matte from scratch in a new session.

According to Adobe's description, the change improves interactivity during the first computation as well: the program no longer has to keep all propagated frames in memory, and part of the RAM is freed up.

Guides and the Effect Controls panel

Guides in the Composition, Layer and Footage panels now support positioning in percentages. They can be pinned to the bottom and right edges of the panel — just as to the top and left ones — and a color can be set for each guide individually.

The Effect Controls panel has been, in Adobe's wording, "modernized": in particular, individual effect instances on a layer can be assigned color labels.

Agentic AI assistant in beta

The assistant accepts detailed instructions in natural language, carries them out and reports on its progress. Adobe names the following use cases among others:

• making sense of someone else's material — the assistant inspects compositions and footage received from project colleagues and returns an automatic summary;
• writing code — Adobe offers the assistant as a way for artists without technical training to obtain custom JavaScript expressions for motion graphics.

Besides automating routine and technical tasks, Adobe points to a lower barrier to entry: new users do not need to know where the tools are located in the interface, or that they exist at all.

Substance materials for text and shapes

The current beta build also includes two additions to the 3D subsystem. Substance materials can now be applied to text and shapes, not just to standard 3D objects. In the Advanced 3D renderer, a composition layer can serve as the source of a material — a texture can be generated from a video layer or an entire precomp.

Where to get it and how much it costs

After Effects 26.5 is available for Windows 11 and macOS 14.0 and above by subscription only: the standalone application costs $34.49 per month or $263.88 per year. In the online documentation the update is also designated as the September 2026 release. The full changelogs are published in the release notes for the stable version and the current beta.

Why Adobe is adding assistants to all of its applications

The 26.5 update looks technical in itself, but the pairing of a quiet release with a conspicuous beta shows where the center of gravity of development is shifting. In previous years Adobe added targeted AI tools to After Effects — Object Matte among them — each solving one specific task inside the familiar interface. The assistant is built differently: it lays claim to the role of a control layer over the entire program, and features such as matte caching become infrastructure for it.

That is probably connected with the fact that the assistants are appearing almost simultaneously in Photoshop, Premiere Pro and now in After Effects: the value of such an interface arises when it works across the whole suite. Against the backdrop of this transition, a practical question also arises for studios: an agent that makes changes to a project on its own requires clear rules for checking the result.

For now the assistant remains in beta, and the company has made no public statements about when it will be moved to the stable version.

Would you let an agent with natural-language commands into a live After Effects project? Or is disk caching for Object Matte enough to make 26.5 worth it for you?