Harvard will confer honorary degrees on five distinguished recipients at its 375th Commencement in 2026, with Conan O’Brien serving as the guest speaker and, traditionally, the final degree recipient. Three men and two women will be honored.
The lineup includes Peggy Noonan, Geoffrey Hinton and O’Brien, giving this year’s Harvard Commencement 2026 a mix of journalism, comedy and one of the most closely watched figures in artificial intelligence. The guest speaker has traditionally been recognized as the final degree recipient, making O’Brien’s role both ceremonial and central to the day.
Hinton, born in Britain, won the 2018 Turing Award for his work on deep learning and was a co-recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational discoveries enabling machine learning using artificial neural networks. He earned a B.A. in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge in 1970 and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978. He is now distinguished professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Toronto.
The timing gives Hinton’s honor a sharper edge than a routine academic tribute. He became a part-time employee of Google in 2013 when the company acquired DNNresearch Inc., then resigned a decade later so he could speak freely about the dangers of AI. In 2023, he told, “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” and has also argued for programming a “maternal instinct” toward humans to reduce the chance that AI harms humanity.
Harvard’s choice also places Malcolm in the same class of honorees, adding a historian whose work spans Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, the Ottoman world, Bosnia and Kosovo. Sir Noel Robert Malcolm, a British historian, political journalist and scholar of early modern Europe and the Balkans, studied at Eton College, Peterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge. He served as a political columnist and foreign editor for The Spectator in the late 1980s and early 1990s, later became chief political columnist for The Daily Telegraph, spent a year at Harvard in 1999 during the Kosovo war and has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford since 2002.
The honor roll underscores what Harvard usually tries to signal on Commencement day: public service, intellectual distinction and cultural reach, all in one procession. This year, the most closely watched name may be Hinton’s, but the most visible figure will be O’Brien, who will stand at the center of the ceremony when Harvard hands out its final honorary degree.
