The Hinton Lectures Return to Toronto: Paul Christiano Headlines Three Nights on AI Safety

Toronto is hosting one of the most closely watched public conversations about artificial intelligence this week. The Hinton Lectures return to the city on November 9-11, 2026, for three nights of talks on AI safety, and this year's lecturer is Paul Christiano, one of the researchers who helped shape how today's AI systems are trained.

The lectures are open to the public in person and are also streamed online. They come at a moment when Canadians are paying closer attention to AI than ever, and when Ottawa has been pouring money into the country's AI industry.

What the Hinton Lectures are

The Hinton Lectures are a public lecture series about artificial intelligence and its safety, co-founded by Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and the AI Safety Foundation. The 2026 edition is the third year of the series. The aim is simple: take the debate about AI safety out of research labs and conference halls, and put it in front of a general audience.

Each year the series invites one distinguished lecturer to give three talks over three nights. Past editions drew packed rooms in Toronto, and the lectures are streamed live so people outside the city can watch too.

This year's series carries extra weight because it kicks off the first ever AI Safety Week, a new run of events built around the lectures.

Who Paul Christiano is

Paul Christiano is one of the best known names in AI safety research. He was an early researcher at OpenAI, where he developed reinforcement learning from human feedback, the technique that taught chatbots to follow instructions and give helpful answers. That method is now used across the industry, and it is one of the reasons modern AI assistants feel so capable in conversation.

Today Christiano is the founder and executive director of the Alignment Research Center, a non-profit that studies how decisions happen inside machine learning systems. The centre's work tries to answer a practical question: as AI systems get more powerful, how can we check what they are doing, and steer them when they go off track?

Christiano also serves as Senior Technical Advisor at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, known as NIST, and sits on the board of the OpenAI Foundation and the OpenAI Safety and Security Committee.

The lecturer for the series is chosen by a nominating committee that includes Hinton himself, Beth Barnes, founder and chief executive of the AI evaluation group METR, Roger Grosse, who holds the Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society, and Shane Legg, co-founder of Google DeepMind and its Chief AGI Scientist. That lineup gives a sense of how seriously the series is taken inside the research world.

Three nights in Toronto

The 2026 lectures run from Monday, November 9 to Wednesday, November 11, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, in the John W. H. Bassett Theatre. Each night features Christiano speaking on a different aspect of AI safety, with the sessions moderated by Canadian futurist, writer and podcaster Sinead Bovell.

The events are open to the public, both in person and through a livestream. Tickets are available through the lecture series website, hintonlectures.com. The organisers announced Christiano as this year's lecturer on October 5, 2026, giving the public a little over a month to plan a visit.

For Toronto, the lectures are also a point of local pride. Hinton spent much of his career at the University of Toronto, where his work on neural networks laid the groundwork for the deep learning boom. The city has since become one of the main hubs for AI research in the world, home to the Vector Institute and a large cluster of startups and labs.

Why Toronto, and why now

The timing is hard to miss. Canadians are thinking about AI more than they used to, and not always with enthusiasm. A recent Abacus Data poll found that 26 percent of Canadians now name artificial intelligence as one of the biggest threats facing the country, up from 10 percent in April 2026. AI now ranks as the second most cited threat in that survey, behind tensions with the United States.

At the same time, the federal government has been moving in the opposite direction, betting heavily on AI as a driver of growth. The 2026 federal budget, tabled on November 5, put billions behind AI programs and data centre construction, and the government announced a 1.6 billion dollar investment in the Toronto AI company Cohere on October 29.

That tension is exactly what the Hinton Lectures are built to explore. The series does not take a position for or against AI development. Its premise is that the public deserves a clear picture of the risks, so the choices about how fast to move, and with what safeguards, can be made with open eyes.

How to watch

The lectures are open to the public, in person at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre and online through a livestream. Registration and tickets are handled through hintonlectures.com. The series is supported by Manulife as presenting partner, under a two-year partnership covering the 2026 and 2027 editions, and by the Global Risk Institute as founding partner.

Frequently Asked Questions

When and where are the 2026 Hinton Lectures?

The lectures run on November 9-11, 2026, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto, in the John W. H. Bassett Theatre. They are open to the public in person and are also streamed live online, with tickets and livestream access available through hintonlectures.com.

Who is Paul Christiano?

Paul Christiano is an AI safety researcher who was an early researcher at OpenAI, where he developed reinforcement learning from human feedback. He is the founder and executive director of the Alignment Research Center, and he advises the US National Institute of Standards and Technology on AI standards. He also sits on the board of the OpenAI Foundation.

What is the Hinton Lectures series?

The Hinton Lectures are a public lecture series on artificial intelligence and AI safety, co-founded by Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and the AI Safety Foundation. Now in its third year, the series invites one distinguished lecturer each year to give three public talks in Toronto. The 2026 edition also kicks off the inaugural AI Safety Week.