The Fourth Annual Dartmouth AI Conference
Celebrate the legacy.
Be part of the future.
Seventy years after John McCarthy and his collaborators coined the phrase artificial intelligence on Dartmouth’s campus, we return to the question they first asked—and to the new ones only possible now.
Date
Friday, October 16, 2026
9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.
VENUE
Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California
FORMAT
In Person
or Virtual
Registration required by October 1.
The conference is closed to the general public. If you are part of the Dartmouth community—an alum of any Dartmouth school, a parent of a current student, faculty, staff, or a current student—you are welcome.
DARTMOUTH
Alumni & Parents
For Dartmouth alumni working in or adjacent to AI, and for parents of current students, attendance supports student access and underwrites the programming that makes the day possible.
$150
DARTMOUTH
Students, Faculty, & Staff
Current Dartmouth students, faculty, and staff attend free of charge. The day is designed around you — your learning, your access to alumni in operating roles, and your showcase of AI-assisted work.
Free Registration
The Origin
The summer that named a field.
In July 1956, ten researchers gathered in Hanover, New Hampshire, for an eight-week workshop proposed by a young Dartmouth mathematician named John McCarthy.
Their proposal, submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation a year earlier, contained two words no one had used together before: artificial intelligence.
The field they named has, seventy years later, become the defining technology of our century. This conference is a return — not to repeat that summer, but to pose the next set of questions with the same seriousness, and in the same company.
1956
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. Eight weeks. Ten minds. One coined term.
The original participants
John McCarthy — Dartmouth
Marvin Minsky — Harvard
Claude Shannon — Bell Labs
Nathaniel Rochester — IBM
Allen Newell — RAND
Herbert Simon — Carnegie
Arthur Samuel — IBM
Ray Solomonoff — MIT
Oliver Selfridge — MIT
Trenchard More — Princeton
The Theme
The judgment premium.
In an era of abundant intelligence, judgment becomes the scarce resource. The question facing every leader, clinician, founder, and policymaker is no longer whether AI can do the work — it is where genuine authority should sit, and where assistance is enough.
Dartmouth’s institutional bet is that human judgment is a differentiable and foundational skill for the AI era — not an anachronism, but a competence to be named, taught, and exercised with intention.
This conference is structured around that bet. Every session asks a version of the same question: when should AI be assistive, and when should it be authoritative?
The frontier is no longer what AI can do.
It is what humans must.
The Program
Six sessions. One day.
A day-long program built around six main-stage sessions. Formats deliberately vary — fireside chats, structured debates, Chatham House discussions, and an interactive closing case — to generate genuine insight rather than rehearsed remarks.
Topics
Opening Keynote
Work, Reordered
Technical Frontiers
Whose Rules?
AI in the Physical World
AI Companions & Mental Health
The Stage
The Speakers
Operators, policymakers, and strategists — selected for the decisions they are actually making in the AI era.
Additional speakers will be announced through the spring and summer.
The Setting
The Computer History Museum.
A fitting vantage point for a conference about the next seventy years: the institution that preserves the machines on which the first seventy were built.
Mountain View sits at the heart of the industry Dartmouth helped name. The venue, the timing, and the theme are deliberately aligned.
Computer History
Museum
1401 N Shoreline Boulevard
Mountain View, California
Attendance
A Dartmouth community gathering.
The Dartmouth AI Conference is the singular annual moment when Dartmouth’s AI community — across classes, industries, and coasts — convenes in one room.
The conference is closed to the general public. If you are part of the Dartmouth community — an alum of any Dartmouth school, a parent of a current student, faculty, staff, or a current student—you are welcome.
For sponsorship inquiries, contact the conference team.
Registration required by October 1.
DARTMOUTH
Alumni & Parents
For Dartmouth alumni working in or adjacent to AI, and for parents of current students, attendance supports student access and underwrites the programming that makes the day possible.
$150
DARTMOUTH
Students, Faculty, & Staff
Current Dartmouth students, faculty, and staff attend free of charge. The day is designed around you — your learning, your access to alumni in operating roles, and your showcase of AI-assisted work.
Free Registration
