PyCon US 2026 heads to Long Beach with dedicated AI and security tracks
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Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach - we have new AI and security tracks this year
Simon Willison →PyCon US 2026 runs May 13-19 in Long Beach, marking the conference’s first return to California since 2013 and to the West Coast since 2017. The main talks span Friday through Sunday, bookended by tutorial and sprint days. This year introduces two dedicated tracks: AI on Friday and Security on Saturday, reflecting where the Python community’s attention has shifted.
The AI track, chaired by Silona Bonewald and Anthropic’s Zac Hatfield-Dodds, covers practical territory: running LLMs locally with quantization, browser-based edge inference, async patterns for agents, GPU memory fundamentals for Python devs, and real-time voice agents. Other sessions address AI-assisted open source contributions and maintainer burden, low-resource language identification for African languages, and adaptive education tooling.
Simon Willison, a PSF board member and 20-year PyCon veteran, pitches the conference’s community character over its corporate polish, highlighting lightning talks, sprints, and open spaces as the real draw. He notes he’ll host open-space sessions on Datasette and agentic engineering, and asks attendees to book the official hotel block to support PSF funding.
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