Today, we are proud to announce the general availability of Oracle APEX AI Application Generator 26.1, the latest release of the Oracle APEX platform. APEX 26.1 marks a significant milestone for the platform. The scope is substantial, but the real story is what it makes possible: enterprise low-code development built for the AI era. It combines proven enterprise-grade capabilities with governed generative development.
APEX is architected for data-centric business applications: applications built around enterprise data, business rules, security, workflows, and real users. That specialization matters even more in the AI era, because trust in AI-generated applications depends on understanding what was generated.
APEX 26.1 brings AI into a declarative platform designed for trust. Instead of generating large volumes of arbitrary application code, AI generates application intent in APEX: structured, declarative metadata that organizations can inspect, review, secure, and evolve. The result is orders of magnitude less generated code to understand, and a generated application enterprises can trust because they can understand it.
If you generate it, you own it. APEX gives teams a way to own AI-generated business applications by making the generated artifact understandable, transparent, and governed from the start.
This release advances that vision through three major capabilities: Oracle APEXlang for governed application generation, Oracle APEX AI Interactive Reports for trusted reporting on approved data, and Oracle APEX AI Agents for approved action inside applications.
Open Application Specification Language (APEXlang)
The centerpiece of Oracle APEX 26.1 is APEXlang: an open, declarative, human-readable specification language for Oracle APEX applications. APEXlang represents an APEX application as a package of structured .apx text files that can be exported, imported, stored in source control, diffed, merged, validated, scanned, and reviewed using standard developer tooling. In the AI era, the application model becomes more than the metadata the platform executes. It becomes the artifact AI can generate. APEXlang gives developers and AI agents a supported way to express application intent in a form that APEX can validate, govern, and execute.
APEXlang is readable, versionable, validatable, AI-ready, and natively supported in Oracle developer tooling. Developers can inspect page metadata in real time with an APEXlang View in Page Designer, produce meaningful Git diffs with Static IDs, validate source through SQLcl before import, and work with APEXlang in Oracle SQL Developer for VS Code.
APEXlang is a specification language because it captures application intent, not implementation. It is open in the sense that it is documented, human-readable, and can be generated by AI agents.
AI Interactive Reports: Talk to Your Data, Trust the Result
AI Interactive Reports let users interact with reports through natural language. A user can ask to show “European customers grouped by industry”, chart service requests by country for countries with more than 50 cases, highlight specific customer segments, or pivot industry by product. APEX can translate those requests directly into native Interactive Report settings: filters, highlights, sorting, control breaks, group bys, aggregations, pivots, and charts.
Trust comes from transparency and control. APEX does not execute AI-generated SQL. Instead, AI interprets the user’s intent and applies declarative Interactive Report settings within the existing report definition and data access rules. Every generated setting appears as a visible, editable, removable chip, so users can see exactly what changed, adjust the result, remove individual settings, or continue refining the report through the UI or conversationally.
Existing applications can take advantage of this capability by enabling natural language support on their Interactive Reports. Developers can add business context to improve how user requests are interpreted, and let users begin refining reports conversationally while preserving the existing report definition and data access rules.
Read the technical blog to learn more.
AI Agents and AI Tools: Governed Conversational Action at the Application Layer
APEX 26.1 makes it easier to add AI Agents that can reason over user requests and take action through approved AI Tools. Each tool exposes a specific application capability the agent is allowed to invoke, within the scope of the application.
The model is simple: an AI Agent handles the conversation, and AI Tools define what the agent is allowed to do. A tool can retrieve data, execute server-side PL/SQL or JavaScript, or request a client-side interaction such as a user confirmation or browser API call. Developers can also use the new Generative AI Tool plug-in type to build reusable custom tools.
APEX manages the execution flow: preparing context, dispatching tool calls, executing tools, handling results, and composing the response. This gives teams a built-in path for adding agentic behavior to APEX applications while keeping the developer in control of the agent’s capabilities and boundaries.
Governance is built into the execution model. The LLM can only call tools attached to the agent. Tool execution happens inside the APEX application boundary. Tool output returns to the model before the final response is composed. The result is a path from simple chat to conversational workflows that can reason, retrieve, ask, confirm, and act.
Read the technical blog to learn more.
Additional Platform Enhancements
APEX 26.1 also delivers significant enhancements across the broader platform, with improvements to workflow automation, page and component development, data reporting, translation management, developer and end-user experience, security, governance, and more.
Explore What’s New in APEX 26.1. For the full list of enhancements, see the Oracle APEX 26.1 release notes.
Get Started
Oracle APEX 26.1 is available today for on-premises deployment across all Oracle AI Database distributions, including Exadata, Linux, and Windows. Rollout across OCI regions and Oracle multi-cloud deployments will follow in the coming weeks.
Try Oracle APEX 26.1 for free at oracleapex.com. Full documentation, newsletter, release notes, APEXlang resources, videos, and feature deep dives are also available from oracle.com/apex.