n8n version 2.40.0, released September 15, 2026, brings a large batch of improvements across AI agent tooling, workflow editing, core platform reliability, and enterprise integrations. The update touches dozens of areas, from preserving Anthropic thinking blocks in AI Agent nodes to allowing fallback models on AI nodes and forcing a tool call on the first iteration. The AI builder now supports duplicating agents, better validation error tooltips, and guidance for agents with no sessions, while the AI Assistant has been renamed to n8n Assistant and gains paginated chat history, background task visibility, and change request handling in preview chats.
On the core side, numerous fixes strengthen execution handling, security, and performance. n8n now accepts numeric pagination tokens, prevents false agent model stream stalls, bounds publication lock waits, enforces execution timeouts in queue mode, repairs legacy-format data-encryption keys during bootstrap, and consolidates secret redaction. The workflow publication service is now enabled by default, triggers are re-registered on every publish, and source control pulls unpublish workflows before deletion. Performance boosts include installing sandbox dependencies from the npm cache again and no longer copying user workflows into the Instance AI sandbox.
Integration coverage expands significantly, especially in the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft Teams gains new Online Meeting create, get, update, and delete operations, plus channel and chat message delete/undo delete and chat member add/remove, with Service Principal paths for many. Microsoft Dataverse receives a core node, Azure Storage adds cloud selection and custom endpoints, Grist supports OAuth2, and the HTTP Request node adds PROPFIND, MKCOL, MOVE, COPY, and REPORT methods. Confluence is unhidden and enabled for AI tool use, and its page picker and sub-tree return are improved. Email Trigger (IMAP) now restores dropped connections and reconnects on publish, Postgres Trigger reconnects on publish, and Microsoft Outlook Trigger fetches the latest message on manual execution.
Other notable fixes include letting one icon file serve both light and dark slots, correcting expression prefix warnings, returning null variable values as empty strings, accepting null headers from the MCP registry API, guarding against 429 errors on channel integrations, closing the variable modal on backdrop click, and hiding the deprecated node with a notice. The update also adds a deprecation warning for the N8N_DB_PING_TIMEOUT environment variable, warns that the chat hub is going away in the migration report, and replaces Git connection CLI commands with Promotions. Overall, this release delivers substantial quality-of-life and reliability gains for self-hosted users.
