He contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theorist (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957) (with Herbert A. Simon).

In 1950, he left Princeton and joined the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica where he worked for "a group that was studying logistics problems of the Air Force".

He joined with fellow RAND teammates John Kennedy, Bob Chapman, and Bill Biel at an Air Force Early Warning Station to study organizational processes in flight crews.

[2] His work came to the attention of economist (and future nobel laureate) Herbert A. Simon, and, together with programmer J. C. Shaw, they developed the first true artificial intelligence program[4](see notes), the Logic Theorist.

The conference, now widely considered the "birth of artificial intelligence",[5] was enormously influential and those who attended became the leaders of AI research for the next two decades, Newell included.

They founded an artificial intelligence laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University and produced a series of important programs and theoretical insights throughout the late fifties and sixties.