Who believes what about AGI.

Nick Bostrom

Author of Superintelligence; founded Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute

Philosopher whose 2014 book Superintelligence made 'existential risk from AI' legible to mainstream audiences and policymakers. Frames the problem as a control problem requiring pre-committed solutions before we create superhuman systems.

Policy / meta · Household name · Symbolic era

Liron Shapira

p 50%

Founder; Doom Debates podcast host

Tech founder (Pulse, Relationship Hero) and host of Doom Debates podcast, where he argues for short timelines and high p(doom) against guests who disagree.

Applied technical · Established · Scaling era

Stuart Armstrong

Aligned AI co-founder; ex-FHI; value-extrapolation approach

Philosopher and AI safety researcher who spent over a decade at the Future of Humanity Institute. Co-founded Aligned AI; his research centres on value extrapolation, the hypothesis that solving how to extend human values across contexts is necessary and nearly sufficient for alignment.

Deep technical · Established · Pre-deep-learning

Joseph Carlsmith

p 10%

Open Philanthropy researcher; 'Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?'

Philosopher and senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy whose 2021 report on power-seeking AI produced the most cited quantitative decomposition of the existential AI risk argument.

Policy / meta · Field-leading · Scaling era

Mozilla fellow and PhD student at UC Berkeley working on algorithmic auditing. Co-authored foundational work with Joy Buolamwini on commercial facial-recognition bias.

Jeff Dean

Google Chief Scientist; co-leader of Google DeepMind

One of two Google Senior Fellows. Took over as chief scientist across Google DeepMind and Google Research after the 2023 reorg. Publicly frames AI as dual-use; emphasises present-day harms over extinction framings.

Frontier builder · Field-leading · Deep-learning rise

ASU computer science professor and former AAAI president who has been the most consistent senior academic voice arguing LLMs cannot plan, reason, or self-verify in the formal senses required for AGI.

Deep technical · Field-leading · Symbolic era

Rebecca Parsons

Thoughtworks CTO emerita; AI pragmatist

Thoughtworks CTO emerita who has written on the practical software engineering implications of AI deployment. Argues careful deployment practices matter more than headline-grabbing safety debates.

Chelsea Finn

Stanford professor; meta-learning and robotics researcher

Stanford CS professor whose robotics and meta-learning research has shaped how frontier labs think about sample-efficient learning and generalisation. Publicly on the safety-engaged side but measured.

Anthropic policy team member who co-authored the Responsible Scaling Policy framework, Anthropic's capability-tied safety commitments which became the most-emulated industry RSP template.

Isaac Asimov

Science fiction author; Three Laws of Robotics author (1920–1992)

Biochemist and prolific SF author whose 1942 'Three Laws of Robotics' pre-figured the alignment problem. Included for historical continuity and because the Three Laws remain a rhetorical reference in AI safety debates.

Philosopher and cognitive scientist at Imperial College and DeepMind. Author of 2015 book The Technological Singularity and recent papers on the 'dissociative identity' frame for understanding LLMs.

Joscha Bach

Cognitive scientist; consciousness researcher

Cognitive scientist and AI researcher whose talks on consciousness and AGI are widely shared. Argues AGI is closer than people think and that the question of whether AI systems are conscious is live.

Deep technical · Established · Pre-deep-learning

Anders Sandberg

Former FHI researcher; transhumanist philosopher

Long-time Oxford FHI researcher who published foundational work on whole-brain emulation and existential risk. Now independent; writes on the philosophy of grand futures.

External-domain expert · Established · Pre-deep-learning

Anthropic communications lead. Has written essays framing the near-term timeline to AGI as the most pressing personal and civilisational concern for her generation.

Philosopher who leads Claude's 'character' work at Anthropic. Central voice on model welfare, AI personality, and virtue-ethics-informed alignment.

Superforecaster who has contributed to AI and x-risk forecasting exercises. Represents the professional-forecaster wing of the AI risk community.

Naomi Klein

Author of This Changes Everything; AI-and-climate critic

Journalist and author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything. Argues that 'AI hallucinations' are a distraction: the actual hallucinations are the promises AI CEOs make to investors and governments.

External-domain expert · Household name · Post-ChatGPT

Marietje Schaake

Former MEP; Stanford Cyber Policy Center fellow; UN AI advisory body

Former EU parliamentarian, now at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center. Serves on the UN Secretary-General's AI Advisory Body. Argues corporate capture of AI governance is the primary democratic threat.

Cory Doctorow

EFF special advisor; 'enshittification' coiner

Long-time digital rights activist and EFF advisor. Argues AI is being driven by the same 'enshittification' dynamic that decayed social platforms, and that capture of AI policy by incumbents will make it worse.

Policy / meta · Household name · Post-ChatGPT

Evgeny Morozov

Belarusian scholar; 'solutionism' critic

Writer on the politics of tech; coined 'technological solutionism'. Argues Silicon Valley AI framings systematically obscure political-economy questions.

External-domain expert · Field-leading · Pre-deep-learning

Ruha Benjamin

Princeton sociologist; 'Race After Technology'

Princeton sociologist whose 2019 Race After Technology coined 'the New Jim Code', the way digital technologies reinforce racial hierarchies. Central voice in the civil-rights framing of AI governance.

Jeremie Harris

Gladstone AI co-founder; AI state policy advisor

Co-founder of Gladstone AI, a US government contractor producing AI risk assessments. Authored the 2024 US State Department commissioned report on frontier AI risks.

Co-founder of Gladstone AI with his brother Jeremie. Contributed to the 2024 US State Department-commissioned action plan on frontier AI risks.

Karen Hao

Atlantic staff writer; AI industry critic

Journalist covering AI for The Atlantic and previously MIT Technology Review. Her reporting on OpenAI, labour in the AI supply chain, and frontier-lab culture has shaped mainstream industry understanding.

Adrienne LaFrance

The Atlantic executive editor; technology critic

Executive editor at The Atlantic whose editorial direction has framed AI coverage around democracy, epistemic integrity, and civic institutions.

Michigan moral philosopher who has argued that reinforcement learning analogues in AI could form the basis for genuinely moral AI agents. Engages AI safety philosophically.

Applied cryptographer and cooperative-AI researcher who works on incentive-compatible market mechanisms for AI agents. Represents the applied multi-agent governance corner.

Angel investor and former chair of the UK AI Safety Institute, which he helped stand up from the November 2023 Bletchley summit. Co-author of the annual 'State of AI Report'.

Machine learning researcher at Epoch AI who has published on reproducibility of capability benchmarks and the scaling-data bottleneck.

Lisa Su

CEO of AMD; central figure in the AI compute supply

Runs AMD, the #2 AI chip supplier. Public voice for 'more compute = more capability' and argues supply-chain constraints rather than demand have been the bottleneck on AI progress.

Policy / meta · Household name · Deep-learning rise

Clément Delangue

CEO of Hugging Face; open-source AI advocate

French co-founder of Hugging Face, the largest open-source AI model hub. Testified to US Congress that open-source AI is 'extremely aligned with American interests'.

Alex Wang

Founder of Scale AI; data infrastructure for frontier models

Youngest self-made billionaire; founded Scale AI to provide data labelling and evaluation infrastructure to frontier labs and US national security agencies.

Policy / meta · Field-leading · Scaling era

Arthur Mensch

CEO of Mistral AI; French frontier-model founder

Co-founder of Mistral AI, the French open-weight foundation model company. Representative of European open-weight frontier effort and AI sovereignty.

Sasha Luccioni

Hugging Face AI & climate lead

Researcher focused on the environmental and energy footprint of large models. Has published widely cited work quantifying the carbon cost of training frontier models.

Researcher at UW and Allen AI whose work on quantization (QLoRA, bitsandbytes) has made frontier-scale fine-tuning feasible on modest hardware. Argues frontier access is an equity question.

Longtime OpenAI RL researcher whose work on exploration (Random Network Distillation) has been widely used in frontier training. Represents the technical-engineering inside view at OpenAI.

Brad Smith

Microsoft Vice Chair and President

Microsoft's president and chief legal officer. Public face of Microsoft's regulatory posture on AI; argues for 'governed progress' via licensing and national-security-aware regulation.

Matt Clifford

UK PM AI Opportunities advisor; Entrepreneur First co-founder

Led the UK AI Safety Summit preparation under Rishi Sunak and the AI Opportunities Action Plan under Keir Starmer. Bridges entrepreneurship and AI safety.

Former chief adviser to UK PM Boris Johnson. Has written extensively on AI risk and governance through his Substack, combining Whitehall experience with an empirical-risk framing.

MIT professor who pioneered clinical decision-support AI in the 1970s. Argues the most urgent AI policy questions concern reliability, evaluation, and deployment context, not superintelligence.

Researcher at Chatham House focused on AI and international order. Has argued that AI's geopolitics will require institutions analogous to the IAEA for frontier compute.

Elizabeth Kelly

Founding director of the US AI Safety Institute

Deputy assistant to the president for economic policy who became the founding director of the US AI Safety Institute at NIST after the October 2023 AI Executive Order.

Former State Department and White House advisor; runs OpenAI's policy work. Represents OpenAI's public face in Washington and Brussels.

Researcher behind Meta's CICERO Diplomacy-playing AI and now a lead on OpenAI's reasoning-model research. Has driven much of the 2024–2025 shift toward chain-of-thought / o-series models.

Anthropic co-founder who worked on GPT-3 at OpenAI. One of the technical architects of Constitutional AI training.

Jared Kaplan

Anthropic co-founder; scaling-laws co-author

Theoretical physicist who co-authored the 2020 'Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models' paper. Anthropic co-founder and chief science officer.

Tom Brown

Anthropic co-founder; first author of GPT-3 paper

First author of 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners' (GPT-3). Anthropic co-founder focusing on infrastructure and safety engineering.

Anthropic co-founder and research lead on training methods. Contributor to foundational scaling-law research at OpenAI before joining Anthropic.

Scholar who has contributed to the Council of Europe's AI convention and argues international human-rights law is the right foundation for AI governance.

DeepMind senior research scientist known for graph neural networks and geometric deep learning. Public educator on deep learning and broadly pro-safety.

Seth Lazar

ANU Professor of Philosophy; MINT Lab founder

Australian National University moral philosopher whose 2023 Stanford Tanner Lecture on AI and human values has been widely cited. Runs the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab.

Shakeel Hashim

Editor of Transformer news; AI policy journalist

Editor of Transformer, the leading weekly AI-policy newsletter. Ex-Economist journalist, now at the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. Frames the beat as 'AI safety and governance' rather than generic tech coverage.

Italian founder of ControlAI, a non-profit calling for prohibition of development of superintelligent AI. Works directly with UK and US policymakers.

Steven Adler

Independent AI researcher; former OpenAI policy team

Ex-OpenAI policy researcher who resigned citing safety culture concerns. Now independent, collaborating with ControlAI on governance proposals.

Freelance journalist who reports on AI safety, effective altruism, and the political-economy dynamics of frontier labs. Has been widely published in Jacobin, The Nation, and other outlets.

Director of the AI Security Initiative at UC Berkeley's Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. Works at the intersection of AI and international security.

Simon Rosenberg

NDN democracy strategist; AI political impact

Democratic strategist whose recent writing has focused on AI's threat to democratic elections. Argues election-security is the near-term critical governance question.

Jim Keller

CEO of Tenstorrent; legendary chip architect

Chip architect who designed key components of AMD, Apple, and Tesla silicon. Now runs Tenstorrent, building open-architecture AI accelerators. Frames compute openness as a democratisation lever.

CMU deep learning professor and former Apple AI research head. Publicly engaged on safety but more measured than the more outspoken camp.

MIT-trained researcher who co-founded Liquid AI to build non-transformer foundation models. Argues the future of AI is architectural diversity rather than monolithic scale.

AI ethicist who studies the governance and moral dimensions of reinforcement learning systems. Argues the norms governing RLHF shape what AI values become.

Julia Galef

Rationalist author; former CFAR president

Rationalist writer and former president of the Center for Applied Rationality. Author of The Scout Mindset. Has written measured takes on AI risk that mostly agree with the non-extreme end of the AI safety community.

Max Roser

Founder of Our World in Data; Oxford economist

Oxford economist who founded Our World in Data. His AI entry and charts have become the standard quantitative reference for AI capability and investment trends.

Laurence Tribe

Harvard constitutional law professor emeritus

Harvard's most prominent constitutional law scholar. Signed the 2023 Statement on AI Risk; frames AI as a constitutional-scale governance challenge requiring robust legal frameworks.

James Manyika

SVP of Research, Technology and Society at Google-Alphabet

Former McKinsey Global Institute chair who now runs research, tech, and society at Alphabet. Signatory to the Statement on AI Risk; public voice for measured 'shared prosperity' framings.

Bill McKibben

Environmental writer; Middlebury scholar

Journalist and climate activist who has extended his civilisational-risk framing to AI. Signed the Statement on AI Risk; argues AI and climate are linked crises of extraction.

External-domain expert · Household name · Post-ChatGPT

Alan Robock

Rutgers climate scientist; nuclear winter researcher

Distinguished Rutgers climate scientist who helped establish modern nuclear winter science. Signatory to the Statement on AI Risk; argues AI should be treated like nuclear weapons as a civilisational hazard.

Angela Kane

Former UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs

Senior UN diplomat who has argued for applying disarmament-style frameworks to AI. Signatory to the Statement on AI Risk.

Martin Hellman

Stanford cryptographer; Turing Award winner

Turing Award-winning cryptographer (Diffie-Hellman key exchange). Long-time activist on nuclear risk; signed the 2023 Statement on AI Risk.

Joseph Sifakis

Turing Award laureate; embedded systems researcher

2007 Turing Award laureate (model checking). Greek-French computer scientist who signed the Statement on AI Risk.

Georgetown CSET researcher who served as White House Special Advisor for AI from 2021 to 2025. Key architect of the Biden administration's chip export controls and the 2023 AI Executive Order.

Kevin Esvelt

MIT biosecurity and gene drive researcher

MIT biologist who invented CRISPR gene drives. Has warned consistently that LLM-assisted biology lowers barriers to bioweapon development; a key advisor to US biosecurity policy.

Researcher focused on how AI affects African contexts; advocate for decolonial AI governance frameworks.

Carme Artigas

Spanish AI and Digital Agenda Secretary; AI Advisory Body co-chair

Former Spanish Secretary of State for Digitalisation and AI who led the EU AI Act negotiations under the Spanish Presidency. Co-chairs the UN AI Advisory Body.

Amandeep Singh Gill

UN Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology

Indian diplomat who serves as the UN Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology. Leads the UN's Global Digital Compact, including its AI provisions.

DeepMind executive leading AI-for-science efforts (AlphaFold, AlphaProof). Frames AI as a scientific instrument for solving structured problems, not a sentient agent.

MIT-trained entrepreneur who argues that compute, energy, and AI governance are the same problem, and that micro-reactor deployment is necessary to decouple AI progress from fossil-energy constraints.

Brookings fellow who has published some of the most cited mainstream work on AI's labour-market impact and policy responses (wage insurance, retraining).

AI Now fellow whose work on China's AI governance has been widely cited in US policy debates. Argues US AI governance often misreads Chinese developments.

AI policy researcher who led UC Berkeley's AI Security Initiative and now works on Responsible AI at Microsoft. Frames AI security as an international-coordination problem.

Irene Solaiman

Chief Policy Officer at Hugging Face

Hugging Face's top policy officer who has led the field's thinking on staged release of AI models since her 2019 work on GPT-2 at OpenAI.

NLP researcher at Johns Hopkins focused on making LLMs more trustworthy, including reasoning reliability and safety-evaluation frameworks in collaboration with Microsoft.

EU AI Office scientist who contributed to the GPAI Code of Practice. Public voice for EU-style risk-tiered regulation.

Political scientist at Oxford's Blavatnik School focused on international AI governance and verification regimes. Argues verifiable compute accounting is plausible and necessary.

Former Centre for the Governance of AI researcher now at RAND, focused specifically on compute governance, the chokepoint framework for frontier AI.

Computer scientist who has published on how to verify AI training and inference via on-chip mechanisms, the technical side of compute governance.

CSET alumnus who now leads AI policy at the Institute for Progress. Focused on chip export controls, compute thresholds, and domestic AI industrial policy.

Former CSET researcher who served on the National Security Council staff as director for technology policy. Worked closely with Ben Buchanan on chip export controls.

29 countries including the US, UK, EU, China, India, and Japan signed the November 2023 Bletchley Declaration, the first international statement on frontier AI risk. This entry stands in for the collective action.

Victor Gao

Chinese diplomat; AI dialogue participant

Chinese diplomat and former adviser who has participated in US-China AI safety track II dialogues. Representative voice of the Chinese establishment's public AI-governance framing.

Chinese AI safety researcher participating in international dialogues on AI alignment and governance, including IDAIS.

Former ML engineer who directs Alliance for the Future, a US policy think tank aligned with the e/acc movement and opposed to frontier AI regulation.

DeepMind researcher who authored doubly-efficient debate protocols for scalable AI oversight. Technical collaborator with Geoffrey Irving.

AI reliability and alignment researcher at OpenAI; previously at DeepMind working on debate-style oversight and reward modelling.

Oxford AI safety researcher who co-authored foundational work defining when reward hacking can occur in learned reward models.

Oxford cognitive neuroscientist and DeepMind senior research scientist. Has written on how cognitive science informs alignment and the nature of AI understanding.

DeepMind research scientist focused on dangerous-capability evaluations. Co-authored foundational papers on red-teaming and evaluation frameworks.

DeepMind research scientist who leads autonomous-replication evaluations, tests for whether models can autonomously set up and run copies of themselves.

CMU assistant professor whose work bridges algorithmic fairness and AI governance. Argues fairness metrics must be tied to concrete consequentialist framings.

Rumman Chowdhury

Former Twitter ML ethics director; Humane Intelligence

Data scientist who ran ML ethics at Twitter and now runs Humane Intelligence, a non-profit red-teaming organisation that partners with frontier labs and DEF CON.

Founder of the AI & Democracy Foundation. Argues AI's threat to democracy lies less in content generation and more in epistemic infrastructure degradation.

Alignment researcher at the Alignment Research Center and independent researcher. Has published influential work on prover-verifier games and eliciting latent knowledge.

Anthropic researcher whose work on inference scaling laws has informed the field's understanding of how reasoning and compute trade off.

Matthew Barnett

Epoch AI forecaster; Metaculus AI timelines

AI forecaster at Epoch AI who co-authors many of the most-cited Metaculus AI questions, including the Transformative AI Date question.

Stephen Casper

MIT PhD researcher; red-teaming and model audit

MIT algorithmic alignment researcher focused on red-teaming, auditing, and interpretability. Has documented how safeguards at current frontier labs are reliably broken by determined red-teamers.

MIT assistant professor and former Stuart Russell PhD student who works on assistance games and practical alignment of AI systems.

DeepMind safety researcher working on model evaluation and alignment. Contributor to several major DeepMind safety publications.

Former VP of Research at OpenAI who helped lead safety research there. Wrote widely-read technical blog posts on RLHF and alignment. Joined Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab in 2024.

Anthropic research scientist focused on red-teaming and sycophancy. Has published foundational work on model evaluation and LM-generated evaluations.

Head of Anthropic's Societal Impact team. Argues that the social dimension of alignment must be front and centre of safety work.

Anthropic engineer known for property-based testing and assurance work. Technical voice on how software-engineering practices can support AI safety.

Researcher at METR focused on autonomous-task evaluations for frontier models. Contributor to the 'task length doubling' frontier-capability tracking.

Cambridge-based AI policy researcher who led foundational work at the Ada Lovelace Institute, GovAI, and CSER. Now leads AI policy at the Centre for Long-Term Resilience, feeding UK government work on frontier AI risks.

AI ethics researcher whose work critiques dominant AI ethics frameworks as too narrowly technical. Former FHI researcher now at Utrecht.

Centre for the Governance of AI researcher who works on AI risk management, structured transparency, and internal AI lab governance structures.

Policy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations focused on AI and international security. Bridges national-security and tech-policy audiences.

Representative of the Global South perspective on AI governance; argues the current AI governance conversation systematically undervalues non-Western stakeholders.

Independent AI safety researcher publishing on LessWrong and the Alignment Forum; contributes to the technical reproduction and critique of frontier-lab claims.

OpenAI research scientist who co-authored foundational scaling laws papers. Public-engineering voice for capability-driven progress.

Lisa Gelobter

tEQuitable founder; former Obama CTO

Former US Chief Digital Service officer under Obama, now founder of tEQuitable, a platform for addressing workplace bias. Has advocated for AI governance that serves workers.

Jeffrey Sachs

Columbia economist; sustainable development advocate

Columbia University professor and UN sustainable development advisor. Argues AI is already transforming labour markets with no adequate policy response, and that technological power without political control is the defining risk of our era.

Maria Ressa

Rappler CEO; 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Filipino-American journalist whose Rappler fought disinformation under the Duterte regime. Won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize and chairs the Paris Charter on AI and Journalism commission.

External-domain expert · Household name · Post-ChatGPT

Mariana Mazzucato

UCL economist; Entrepreneurial State author

Economist known for arguing the state is the primary driver of transformative innovation. Has turned this framework on AI: argues AI policy must be oriented toward mission-driven public investment, not laissez-faire.

Robert Reich

Former US Labor Secretary; UC Berkeley professor

Former Clinton Labor Secretary whose recent commentary has focused on AI's disruption of labour markets and the need for anti-concentration AI policy.

Renée DiResta

Former Stanford Internet Observatory research manager

Disinformation researcher whose work on the Russian IRA, COVID, and AI disinformation has been highly influential. Joined Georgetown CPIP in 2024 after the shutdown of Stanford Internet Observatory.

UC Berkeley professor who helped pioneer digital image forensics. Leads deepfake-detection research and advocates for provenance-based governance of synthetic media.

RAND researcher focused on AI risks in biology, cyber, and national security. Contributed to the 2024 Gladstone action plan and subsequent US policy work.

Technology law professor whose work on algorithmic accountability has informed EU and US regulatory design. Argues tort law and traditional liability frameworks have more to offer than they get credit for.

Boston University law professor whose book Privacy's Blueprint shaped modern discussion of privacy by design. Argues AI governance should embed legal duties of loyalty and care.

Frank Pasquale

Brooklyn Law; Black Box Society

Brooklyn Law professor whose 2015 Black Box Society foreshadowed modern debate about AI accountability. Advocates 'functional' laws of AI, humans must retain moral agency and accountability.

Policy / meta · Field-leading · Deep-learning rise

Law professor whose work has shaped modern thinking about tort law, AI liability, and the legal status of autonomous systems.

University of Washington law professor who helped establish robotics law as a field. Argues AI law must learn from aviation, medicine, and other sector-specific regulatory histories.

MIT researcher whose quantitative work on compute, scaling, and algorithmic progress has become standard reference material. Director of FutureTech at MIT CSAIL.

Anna Bacciarelli

Human Rights Watch senior researcher; formerly Amnesty International

Founded Amnesty International's AI and algorithmic accountability program; now at Human Rights Watch. Co-author of the Toronto Declaration on Human Rights and AI.

Darío Gil

SVP and Director of IBM Research

Leads IBM Research and has been a public voice for IBM's view that AI governance should be centered on shared standards and competitive openness rather than moratoria or extinction framings.

Film concept artist whose collaboration with Gary Marcus on 'AI is a plagiarism machine' put image-model copyright litigation into the mainstream.

Former Stability AI VP of Audio who resigned in November 2023 citing disagreement with fair-use defence of training data. Now runs Fairly Trained, a certifier of consent-based AI training.

Heads the OECD's AI Unit, including OECD.AI and its policy observatory. Responsible for convening the 38 OECD member states on AI governance.

Michał Kosiński

Stanford psychologist; psychometric AI researcher

Stanford psychologist whose work has shown that off-the-shelf LLMs can pass cognitive, moral, and psychometric tests at human or super-human levels. Argues emergent capabilities are already more extensive than acknowledged.

Inga Strümke

NTNU AI researcher; Norwegian AI public voice

Norwegian AI researcher whose public communication on AI risk and opportunity has made her one of Scandinavia's leading voices on AI.

Anja Kaspersen

UN senior fellow; disarmament diplomat

Norwegian diplomat and former director of UN disarmament. Has pushed for applying arms-control frameworks to AI.

Fumio Kishida

Former Prime Minister of Japan (2021–2024); Hiroshima AI Process architect

Led Japan's G7 presidency in 2023, launching the Hiroshima AI Process as the premier G7-level international AI governance framework. Architect of the G7 International Guiding Principles for Advanced AI Systems.

Policy / meta · Household name · Post-ChatGPT

Chinese researcher whose work on AI governance bridges Western and Chinese perspectives; contributor to Chinese standards bodies and international dialogues.

Urvashi Aneja

Founding Director of Digital Futures Lab (India)

Indian researcher and founder of Digital Futures Lab, a Goa-based research practice focused on AI and society from a Global South perspective.

Ashwini Vaishnaw

Minister of Electronics and IT, Government of India

Indian cabinet minister responsible for the AI Mission and the Digital India Act. Balances US–China framing with India's 'AI for All' strategy.

Nandan Nilekani

Infosys co-founder; architect of India's Aadhaar digital ID

Infosys co-founder and architect of India's Aadhaar and UPI digital public infrastructure. Advocates AI governance built on digital public infrastructure rather than proprietary AI.

Enrique Dans

IE University professor; AI commentator

Spanish technology professor whose blog and Forbes column have been widely-read European commentary on AI deployment and governance.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Former Indian Minister of State for Electronics and IT

Former Indian deputy IT minister who oversaw India's early AI policy formation. Advocate for regulatory frameworks that balance sovereign AI with open ecosystems.

Middle East and North Africa-focused AI policy voice. Argues MENA perspectives are systematically missing from mainstream AI governance discussions.

Stanford researcher whose work on human-AI creative interaction has shaped understanding of how AI affects human authorship. Published in Science on generative AI governance.

Gabriel Weinberg

Founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo

Founder of DuckDuckGo who has extended his privacy advocacy into AI. Argues AI surveillance is more dangerous than search-engine surveillance and should be banned.

Chair of People-Centered Internet, founded with Vint Cerf. Chairs the Digital Cooperation and Diplomacy network. Advocates AI governance rooted in inclusive digital cooperation.

Moxie Marlinspike

Signal co-founder; cryptographer

Cryptographer who co-founded Signal. Has written on software-supply-chain risk in a world of ubiquitous AI-assisted coding.

Anil Dash

Glitch former CEO; technology culture writer

Longtime technology culture writer and ex-CEO of Glitch. Has written extensively on how AI fits (and breaks) the existing labour, media, and civic institutions.

Mireille Hildebrandt

Brussels jurist and philosopher; 'algorithmic governance' theorist

Belgian jurist and philosopher whose work on 'smart technologies and the end of law' established foundational European framings for algorithmic governance.

Policy / meta · Established · Deep-learning rise

Erie Meyer

Former CFPB Chief Technologist

Former Chief Technologist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the US Digital Service. Now at Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator on AI and consumer protection.

Microsoft Research senior principal researcher whose work on algorithmic fairness has become standard reference. Contributes to mainstream technical safety work.

Microsoft Research VP who leads the AI Frontiers lab. Runs mainstream industry research on AI reliability, tool use, and safety.

Thomas Dietterich

Oregon State emeritus; AAAI past president

Distinguished AI researcher and former AAAI president. Has argued AI safety should focus on everyday reliability failures, not extinction scenarios.

Deep technical · Field-leading · Symbolic era

Zeynep Tufekci

Princeton sociologist; NYT columnist

Princeton sociologist and NYT opinion columnist whose work has shaped mainstream understanding of algorithmic influence on democracy and epistemic ecosystems.

Nicholas Thompson

CEO of The Atlantic; former Wired editor

CEO of The Atlantic and former Wired editor whose interviews with AI leaders have shaped mainstream understanding of frontier AI. Public commentator on AI and democracy.

Martin Ford

Rise of the Robots author; labour economics of AI

Author of the 2015 Rise of the Robots and 2021 Rule of the Robots, arguing AI will displace cognitive labour on a scale requiring fundamental economic policy responses.

Amnesty International researcher focused on AI-enabled surveillance and human-rights violations. Co-led Amnesty's facial-recognition investigations.

Brown CS professor and former OSTP deputy who co-led the development of the 2022 AI Bill of Rights blueprint.

Former deputy administrator of the US Digital Service. Helped design responsible-procurement policies for federal AI purchasing.

CMU professor whose 2019 paper on the carbon footprint of NLP training was the first widely-cited quantification of AI's environmental cost. Has continued to publish on energy efficiency and sustainability.

Brookings senior fellow and sociologist whose work on AI in policing has shaped mainstream discussion of algorithmic predictive policing.

Michael Page

Anthropic policy team

Anthropic policy team member focused on frontier model governance. Former Future of Life Institute AI policy lead.

Christof Koch

Neuroscientist; Allen Institute for Brain Science

Neuroscientist known for work on the neural correlates of consciousness. Argues AI systems may approach consciousness on an integrated-information-theory basis.

External-domain expert · Field-leading · Symbolic era

Shivon Zilis

Neuralink director; OpenAI board alumna

Canadian technology executive who serves on the Neuralink leadership team. Former OpenAI board observer (2016–2019) and long-time Musk collaborator on AI safety framings.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior fellow focused on China's AI development. Author of widely-cited tracking reports on Chinese AI governance.

Evan Williams

Twitter co-founder; Medium founder

Twitter and Medium co-founder who has written about his concerns with AI-driven social media and with the direction of the industry.

Policy / meta · Household name · Post-ChatGPT

Representative voice for Bangladesh and Global South AI-governance perspectives. Writes on AI applications in developing economies.

Brian Tse

Founder of Concordia AI; China AI safety

Founder of Concordia AI, a Beijing-based research organisation focused on AI safety and Chinese-Western dialogue.

Chinmayi Arun

Yale ISP fellow; Indian tech policy scholar

Legal scholar whose work bridges Indian, US, and international tech policy. Has published on AI and content moderation, the digital public sphere, and platform governance.

Steven Weber

UC Berkeley political scientist; tech governance

Berkeley political scientist who has written widely on tech governance, including Success of Open Source and recent work on AI and international order.

Alex Karp

CEO of Palantir

Palantir CEO who has positioned the company as the main Western defense-AI vendor. Publicly argues the US must win the AI race against China and that AI safety framings risk American defeat.

Policy / meta · Household name · Deep-learning rise

Palmer Luckey

Founder of Anduril; defense AI builder

Oculus founder who founded Anduril to build Western defense AI and autonomous systems. Argues the US and allies must develop AI-enabled weapons before adversaries.

Commentator · Household name · Scaling era

Former OpenAI researcher who led formal mathematics work (miniF2F, curriculum learning). Co-founded Dust.tt, a platform for building AI agents inside companies.

Casey Handmer

Founder of Terraform Industries; AI economics commentator

Former Caltech/JPL physicist who founded Terraform Industries. Writes widely on AI's economic implications and has argued AI will produce a small number of extreme-productivity individuals.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Science fiction novelist; The Ministry for the Future

Hugo-winning science fiction writer whose 2020 The Ministry for the Future centres AI systems managing global coordination on climate. Has become a reference framing for hopeful-but-serious AI governance futures.

Kevin Collier

NBC News cybersecurity reporter; AI coverage

NBC News cybersecurity reporter whose recent coverage of AI has focused on real-world deployment risks, disinformation, and governance debates.

Lisa Gilbert

Public Citizen co-president; AI and democracy

Co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer-rights non-profit. Has pushed AI-accountability policy at state and federal levels.

Data & Society researcher focused on AI and labour, including data workers in the Global South and US gig economy.

Shannon Vallor

Edinburgh philosopher of technology; 'The AI Mirror'

Edinburgh philosopher whose 2024 book The AI Mirror argues AI reflects and amplifies human values rather than creating new ones. Former senior Googler on responsible AI.

Randi Weingarten

President of the American Federation of Teachers

Leads the 1.7-million-member AFT, positioning it as a major labour voice on AI in education. Argues teachers must be in control of how AI is deployed in classrooms.

Arvind Krishna

CEO of IBM

IBM CEO who has positioned IBM as the measured enterprise-AI vendor. Supports AI regulation on accountability grounds but opposes rules that hamper business predictability.

Dorothy Denning

Georgetown emeritus; cybersecurity pioneer

Georgetown University emeritus professor who helped establish computer security as a field. Has written on AI's implications for cybersecurity and national defense.

Peter Wang

Co-founder of Anaconda; scientific Python and AI

Co-founder of Anaconda, the default Python distribution for scientific and AI computing. Public commentator on open-source AI and the politics of the Python ecosystem.

Laura Weidman Powers

Co-founder of Code2040; diversity in AI

Co-founder of Code2040, a non-profit focused on Black and Latinx representation in technology. Argues AI will reproduce existing inequities unless the AI workforce diversifies.

Anna Eshoo

Former US Representative (CA); AI Foundation Model Transparency Act sponsor

Silicon Valley Democrat who co-chaired the Congressional AI Caucus and co-sponsored the AI Foundation Model Transparency Act. Retired from Congress in January 2025.

Don Beyer

US Representative (VA); AI Foundation Model Transparency Act sponsor

Virginia Democrat who co-sponsored the AI Foundation Model Transparency Act with Anna Eshoo. Studying for a master's in machine learning at George Mason University during his congressional tenure.

Liz Fong-Jones

Honeycomb field CTO; tech labour voice

Former Google SRE who became a prominent voice in tech labour organising after the Google walkout. Now Honeycomb Field CTO. Public voice on AI worker rights.

Director of the Cascadia Innovation Corridor; former UW law professor specialising in technology governance. Advocate for regional technology regulatory capacity.

Dan Jurafsky

Stanford NLP professor; textbook author

Stanford NLP professor whose Speech and Language Processing textbook has been the canonical NLP reference for two decades. Has written on AI's impact on language and discourse.

Cardiff University professor and co-founder of the Data Justice Lab. Scholar of data-driven surveillance and algorithmic injustice.

Strategist who has pushed anti-racism frameworks in tech companies, including AI ethics teams. Public voice for structural framings of AI governance.

Brookings technology fellow who worked with the African Union on developing the AU-AI Continental Strategy. Named one of Time's 100 most influential people in AI in 2024.

Argentine researcher and Berkman Klein affiliate focused on digital platforms, AI, and Latin American governance. Works on comparative AI governance across the region.

Renata Ávila

Open Future CEO; digital rights lawyer

Guatemalan human-rights lawyer who serves as CEO of Open Future, a European think tank on the digital commons. Works on digital sovereignty for emerging economies.

Paola Ricaurte Quijano

Tec de Monterrey; data-centric epistemic justice

Mexican researcher whose work on 'data epistemologies' has influenced decolonial AI ethics frameworks. Co-founder of the Tierra Común network.

Georgetown CSET researcher focused on China's AI research ecosystem. Has contributed to US understanding of Chinese AI talent and capability developments.

Computational linguist whose research focuses on African languages in LLMs. Argues current LLMs systematically fail African users.

Former human-rights lawyer and now principal at the Omidyar Network focused on responsible technology. Public voice on AI and democracy, especially in MENA.

Susan Schneider

FAU; 'Artificial You' author; machine consciousness

Director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University; author of 'Artificial You' (2019). Has held NASA and Library of Congress chairs in technology and ethics.

Margaret Boden

Sussex emerita; cognitive science of AI

Research professor of cognitive science at the University of Sussex emerita; one of the founding scholars of cognitive science. Author of 'AI: Its Nature and Future' (2016) and 'Mind as Machine' (2006).

Professor of law and philosophy at Duke; author of 'The Battle for Your Brain' (2023) on neurotechnology, AI, and cognitive liberty. Member of the National Advisory Council on Bioethics.

David Eagleman

Stanford neuroscientist; Neosensory founder

Adjunct professor of neuroscience at Stanford; founder of Neosensory. Author of 'Livewired' (2020). Public communicator on neuroplasticity and human-machine integration.

Naval Ravikant

AngelList co-founder; tech philosopher

Co-founder of AngelList; widely-followed angel investor and tech aphorist. Public commentator on AI as a tool for individual leverage rather than concentrated power.

Mark Cuban

Shark Tank investor; Dallas Mavericks owner

Tech entrepreneur, Shark Tank investor, and former owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Frequent commentator on business implications of AI; holds large positions in AI-adjacent companies.

Anthropic researcher whose work on dictionary-learning sparse autoencoders for Claude was a landmark in scaling mechanistic interpretability beyond toy models.

Sebastian Ruder

Cohere; ex-Google; NLP transfer learning

Researcher at Cohere; previously at Google. His 2018 'NLP's ImageNet moment has arrived' essay coined widely-used framing for transfer learning in NLP.

Investor at Founders Fund focused on AI; previously a software engineer. Frequent commentator on AI infrastructure and its market structure.

Macquarie University Lecturer in the Philosophy of AI; previously Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia. Researches the philosophical implications of large language models for theories of mind, meaning, and reasoning.

Researcher at Cohere; previously a UCL DeepMind PhD student. Co-developed adversarial-training and evaluation methods for question-answering and instruction-following.

Independent researcher and author of 'Technology Is Not Neutral' (2022). Frequent BBC and Financial Times contributor on tech ethics.

David Holz

Midjourney founder

Founder of Midjourney, the image-generation service that grew rapidly through Discord-first distribution. Previously co-founded Leap Motion. Vocal proponent of AI as creative augmentation rather than replacement.

Founder and CEO of DoNotPay, a consumer legal-services AI company; widely covered for plans to deploy an AI lawyer in court (eventually withdrawn under bar complaints).

Bryan Johnson

Blueprint founder; AI-driven longevity

Founder of Kernel (neural interfaces) and of Blueprint (the personal-data-driven anti-aging protocol). Frequent commentator on AI as a means of human optimization and longevity.

David Baszucki

Roblox CEO; co-founder

Co-founder and CEO of Roblox; long-running advocate of user-generated content as the dominant form of digital experience and of AI as the tool that makes UGC accessible to everyone.

John Carmack

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Keen Technologies founder; ex-Meta CTO

Co-founder of id Software (Doom, Quake) and former CTO of Oculus VR / Meta Reality Labs. In 2022 left Meta to found Keen Technologies, focused on AGI research with reportedly low team headcount.

Sam Harris

Making Sense podcast; neuroscientist and philosopher

Author and host of the Making Sense podcast; neuroscientist and philosopher. His 2016 TED talk 'Can we build AI without losing control over it?' was an early mainstream introduction to AI x-risk arguments.

CEO of the UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), launched in 2023 to fund high-risk, high-reward research. Previously a program director at U.S. ARPA-E.

David D. Cox

MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab director

Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab; previously a Harvard professor of molecular and cellular biology. Bridge figure between academic and corporate AI research.

Neal Stephenson

Sci-fi novelist; Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Anathem, Termination Shock

Sci-fi novelist whose books have repeatedly anticipated technical developments (the metaverse, cryptocurrency); recent novels and essays grapple directly with AI's social effects.

Liu Cixin

Sci-fi novelist; Three-Body Problem trilogy

Chinese science fiction author whose 'Three-Body Problem' trilogy has become globally influential; the 'dark forest' theory has shaped how some readers think about AI civilizations and existential risk.

Arati Prabhakar

White House OSTP director (2022–2025)

Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Assistant to the President for Science and Technology under the Biden administration. Previously DARPA director (2012–2017) and NIST director (1993–1997).

Paul Scharre

CNAS executive VP; 'Army of None', 'Four Battlegrounds' author

Executive Vice President at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS); author of 'Army of None' (2018) on autonomous weapons and 'Four Battlegrounds' (2023) on AI in great-power competition.

Adjunct senior fellow at CNAS specializing in Chinese military innovation; cited extensively in U.S. policy debates about Chinese AI development.

Senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace specializing in technology and international affairs. Former U.S. intelligence official.

Steven Levy

Wired editor at large; long-time tech historian

Editor at large at Wired and author of multiple histories of computing including 'Hackers' (1984), 'In the Plex' (2011) on Google, and 'Facebook: The Inside Story' (2020). Long-running interview access at frontier labs.

Hal Varian

UC Berkeley emeritus; Google chief economist emeritus

Emeritus chief economist at Google (2002–2023) and Distinguished Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley emeritus. Pioneer of digital-platform economics; co-author of 'Information Rules' (1999).

Trae Stephens

Anduril co-founder; Founders Fund partner

Co-founder of Anduril Industries (defense AI hardware) and partner at Founders Fund. Frequent commentator on the integration of AI into Western defense capabilities.

Co-founder and CEO of Anduril Industries since 2017. Helped build the company into a major defense technology player integrating autonomous systems with command-and-control software.

Chris Hughes

Facebook co-founder turned antitrust advocate

Co-founder of Facebook; co-chair of the Economic Security Project. In 2019 publicly called for breaking up Facebook; has since extended antitrust framing to OpenAI and AI-cloud concentration.

Katherine Boyle

Andreessen Horowitz; American Dynamism

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz leading the firm's American Dynamism practice (defense, aerospace, public-interest tech). Previously a journalist at the Washington Post.

Virginia Dignum

Umeå University; UN AI Advisory Body member

Professor of responsible AI at Umeå University; author of 'Responsible Artificial Intelligence' (2019); member of the UN AI Advisory Body. Long-standing voice in European AI ethics.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Northeastern; Institute for Experiential AI

Director of research at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University; previously a VP at Yahoo Research. Long-time voice on responsible AI auditing and bias detection.

Professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Bath; co-author of foundational textbooks on Support Vector Machines and kernel methods. Author of 'The Shortcut: Why Intelligent Machines Do Not Think Like Us' (2023).

John Naughton

Cambridge / Open University; Observer technology columnist

Long-time Observer (UK) technology columnist; emeritus professor of public understanding of technology at the Open University. Co-director of Cambridge's Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

Professor at National Taiwan University; widely-watched online instructor for ML/LLMs in Mandarin. Has been a key public communicator of LLM concepts to Chinese-speaking audiences.

Co-founder and CEO of Lelapa AI, a South African AI lab building NLP models for African languages including isiZulu, Sesotho, and Yoruba. Vocal advocate for region-led AI infrastructure.

Vukosi Marivate

Univ Pretoria; African NLP / Masakhane

Associate professor at the University of Pretoria; co-founder of the Masakhane research community for African NLP. Long-running advocate for low-resource language model development.

Toby Walsh

UNSW Sydney; AI safety advocate

Scientia Professor of AI at UNSW Sydney; chief scientist of the UNSW AI Institute. Long-standing campaigner against autonomous weapons and a leading public voice for AI regulation in Australia.

Genevieve Bell

ANU; vice-chancellor; cultural anthropologist

Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University since 2024; previously a senior fellow and VP at Intel, where she founded the Anthropology and User Experience research group. Distinctive cultural-anthropological perspective on AI.

Brian Tomasik

Foundational Research Institute co-founder; suffering-focused ethics

Co-founder of the Foundational Research Institute (now Center on Long-Term Risk); long-standing essayist on suffering-focused ethics and digital sentience. His writing has shaped EA-adjacent positions on AI welfare.

Co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR); long-time figure in rationalist and AI-risk circles. Helped train many current alignment researchers through CFAR workshops in 2010s.

Philosopher and former Future Fund co-founder. Author of 'On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future' (2013), one of the foundational texts of academic longtermism.

Paul Bloom

Yale and University of Toronto; cognitive science of AI moral status

Professor of psychology at Yale and University of Toronto; author of 'Against Empathy' and 'Psych'. Public commentator on AI's moral status, deception, and our intuitive responses to artificial minds.

Simon Willison

Independent developer; co-creator of Django; LLM tools

Co-creator of the Django web framework and founder of Datasette. His blog at simonwillison.net has been one of the most-read developer-oriented sources of LLM analysis since GPT-3, with extensive practical attention to prompt injection and capability evaluation.

Researcher at Scale AI; widely credited as one of the first practitioners to systematically explore the boundaries of LLM behaviour through prompting. Coined many of the foundational examples of prompt injection.

George Hotz

Comma.ai / tinygrad founder

Founder of Comma.ai (open-source autonomy) and tinygrad (compact deep-learning framework). Self-taught hacker famous for jailbreaking the iPhone and PS3; vocal opponent of frontier-AI doomerism.

Senior researcher at Apollo Research; works on mechanistic interpretability and on detecting deceptive cognition in language models.

Co-founder of 80,000 Hours and host of its podcast. Has interviewed many of the people on this list at unusual length, with a recent emphasis on AI risk and policy.

Co-founder of 80,000 Hours, the EA career-advice organization that has placed hundreds of researchers into AI safety roles. Author of '80,000 Hours: Find a fulfilling career that does good'.

Executive director of PauseAI US; previously a researcher at Centre for Effective Altruism. Visible organizer of in-person protests and policy advocacy for an enforced pause on frontier training.

Spencer Greenberg

Clearer Thinking founder; rationality researcher

Mathematician and entrepreneur; founded Clearer Thinking, a behavioural research and rationality-tools project. Hosts the Clearer Thinking podcast where AI risk is a recurring theme.

Host of the Future of Life Institute Podcast; long-form interviews with AI safety researchers, policy figures, and adjacent thinkers. Influential conduit for technical alignment discourse.

Tobias Lütke

Shopify CEO; AI-first internal mandate

Founder and CEO of Shopify. In April 2025 issued an internal memo stating that 'reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation' for all Shopify employees, one of the most explicit AI-first labor policies from a major company.

Commentator · Household name · Post-ChatGPT

Sam Hammond

Foundation for American Innovation senior economist

Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation (formerly Lincoln Network); writes the 'Second Best' Substack on technology and political economy. Argues for an aggressive U.S. industrial policy on AI compute.

Sal Khan

Khan Academy founder; AI tutor advocate

Founder of Khan Academy. In 2023 launched Khanmigo, an AI tutor based on GPT-4. Advocates publicly that AI tutoring done well can produce Bloom's '2-sigma' learning gains for every student.

Eric Topol

Scripps cardiologist; AI in medicine pioneer

Founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute; cardiologist and author of 'Deep Medicine' (2019). Long-standing voice on how AI should reshape clinical practice.

Holly Herndon

Musician; 'Holly+' digital twin and Spawning

Composer and electronic musician whose work pioneered AI-assisted music; co-founded Spawning, which built tools for artists to opt out of generative AI training datasets.

McGill assistant professor and Mila core faculty; co-founder of Climate Change AI. Co-author of the influential 'Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning' (2019) paper.

Daniel Susskind

Oxford / King's College London; AI and work economist

Oxford economist; senior research associate at King's College London. Author of 'A World Without Work' (2020) and co-author with father Richard Susskind of 'The Future of the Professions' (2015).

Anton Korinek

UVA economist; AI and inequality

University of Virginia professor of economics; senior fellow at Brookings. Has produced influential work on AI's macroeconomic implications and on transformative AI scenarios.

Richard Susskind

Tech-and-law thinker; 'Future of the Professions'

British author and IT advisor to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales; pioneer of 'online courts' and frequent speaker on AI's effect on legal services.

Senior research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and author of the widely read 'Interconnects' newsletter. Co-leads Ai2's open-source post-training research and publishes detailed analyses of frontier-lab releases.

CEO of the Allen Institute for AI since 2023; previously a senior director at Apple. Computer-vision researcher (YOLO; UW) and longtime advocate of open-source frontier models.

ML engineer and author whose work on production ML systems and LLM evaluation has shaped industry practice. Previously co-founded Claypot AI; ex-NVIDIA, ex-Snorkel.

Ronen Eldan

Microsoft Research; 'TinyStories' author; mathematician

Microsoft Research mathematician; co-author of 'TinyStories' (2023), which showed that small language models trained on synthetic children's stories can produce coherent text, reframing what 'small' models can do.

Henry Kissinger

Former U.S. Secretary of State; co-author 'The Age of AI'

Former U.S. Secretary of State (1973–77); died 2023. Co-authored 'The Age of AI: And Our Human Future' (2021) with Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, framing AI as a category-shifting transformation in the structure of knowledge.

Co-founder of Zapier and, with François Chollet, of the 'ARC Prize', a public competition built around the ARC-AGI benchmark to reward systems that demonstrate genuine generalization rather than scaled pattern matching.

Anthropic researcher; co-lead author of the Constitutional AI paper introducing principles-based RLHF training and harmlessness from AI feedback.

Anthropic researcher whose work on sparse autoencoders, attention dynamics, and dictionary learning has been central to the mechanistic interpretability program.

Anthropic researcher and longtime fixture of the AI safety research community. Co-author of OpenAI's 'AI and Compute' analysis. Was a longtime safety advocate at Google Brain and Open Philanthropy.

Anthropic researcher whose path from theoretical astrophysics to AI safety is widely cited as a model for cross-field switching. Researches deceptive alignment risks.

Open Philanthropy researcher whose detailed analyses of AI takeoff dynamics, training data running out, and alignment training methods have been widely cited in EA circles.

Christopher Manning

Stanford NLP director; foundation models

Stanford professor of computer science and linguistics; director of the Stanford AI Lab. Co-led the Center for Research on Foundation Models. Author of the 'Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing' (1999) and 'Speech and Language Processing' (with Jurafsky).

Garry Kasparov

Former world chess champion; 'Deep Thinking' author

Former world chess champion; in 1997 lost a match against IBM's Deep Blue, an inflection moment for public perception of AI. Author of 'Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins' (2017).

Hannah Fry

Cambridge mathematician; 'Hello World' author

Mathematician and broadcaster; Cambridge professor (from 2024) and author of 'Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine' (2018). Frequent BBC presenter on algorithms and decision-making.

Tim Urban

Wait But Why; viral AI explainer

Author of the Wait But Why blog. His 2015 two-part series on superintelligence reached an order-of-magnitude wider audience than any prior writing on AI safety and shaped the public picture for years.

Lila Ibrahim

DeepMind COO; AI ethics governance

Chief Operating Officer of Google DeepMind. Previously president of Coursera. Helped institutionalize DeepMind's Ethics & Society and AI Safety teams.

Founder and host of TWIML (This Week in Machine Learning & AI), one of the longest-running independent technical AI podcasts. Has interviewed hundreds of researchers from across the alignment, capability, and applications spectrum.

Researcher at the UK AI Security Institute (AISI); previously at Anthropic. Doctoral work on pretraining-time alignment via behaviour-cloning and conditional control.

Anthropic alignment researcher whose work on AI control, designing evaluations to test whether models can subvert oversight even when they are trying to, has been widely cited in safety circles.

Marc Raibert

Boston Dynamics founder; AI Institute executive director

Founder of Boston Dynamics and now executive director of the AI Institute (Hyundai-backed). Veteran roboticist with views shaped by decades of building physical machines that have to behave in the real world.

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz focused on AI infrastructure and applications. Previously founded Ubiquity6 (acquired by Niantic). Board member of Mistral AI and others.

Ozzie Gooen

Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute founder

Founder of the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute (QURI); created Squiggle, a probabilistic estimation language. Vocal in EA forums about applying calibrated estimation to AI risk and longtermism.

Vivek Wadhwa

Tech writer and ex-academic; serial AI critic

Tech writer and former Stanford / Carnegie Mellon distinguished fellow. Frequent commentator on AI's social and labor impacts, generally skeptical of frontier-lab self-regulation.

Sara Beery

MIT EAPS / CSAIL; AI for ecology

MIT assistant professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science / EAPS; widely cited for using ML to scale ecological monitoring and biodiversity science.

Justin Trudeau

Prime Minister of Canada (2015–2025)

Prime Minister of Canada from 2015 to early 2025. Hosted the 2018 G7 with AI on the agenda; oversaw the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy. His government pursued bills C-27 and AIDA on AI regulation.

Anthony Albanese

Prime Minister of Australia (2022–)

Prime Minister of Australia since 2022. His government commissioned and responded to the 2023 'Safe and Responsible AI in Australia' consultation and supported voluntary AI safety standards.

Scott Wiener

California State Senator; SB-1047 author

California State Senator (D-San Francisco) who authored SB-1047, the 2024 'Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier AI Models Act' that became the most-debated state-level frontier-AI safety legislation. Vetoed by Governor Newsom on 29 September 2024.

Ro Khanna

U.S. Representative (CA-17); Silicon Valley House member

U.S. Representative for California's 17th district (Silicon Valley); senior member of the House AI Caucus. Has co-led legislation on algorithmic accountability and chip export policy.

Gavin Newsom

Governor of California; SB-1047 vetoer

Governor of California since 2019. In September 2024 vetoed SB-1047 (frontier AI safety bill) while issuing executive orders directing the state to develop alternative guardrails.

Associate fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; one of the most-read English-language analysts of the EU AI Act. Frequently consulted by U.S. policymakers translating Brussels into Washington.

Financial Times AI editor and author of 'Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI' (2024). Reported the working conditions of data labelers and content moderators powering frontier ML.

Essayist and author of 'God, Human, Animal, Machine' (2021), a literary investigation of how religious metaphors structure the AI age and how loss of those metaphors shapes contemporary epistemology.

Trevor Paglen

Artist; AI surveillance and computer vision

Artist and geographer whose work investigates the apparatus of state surveillance and the visual training data that underpins computer vision. Collaborated on 'ImageNet Roulette' with Kate Crawford.

John Thornhill

Financial Times innovation editor

Financial Times innovation editor; one of the most-read European columnists on AI strategy and competition. Co-host of the Tech Tonic podcast.

Associate professor at the University of Washington Information School; coined 'data violence' as a frame for harms perpetrated through data systems, and has written widely on philosophy of information.

University of Chicago associate professor specializing in safety, robustness, and trustworthiness of ML systems. Lead developer of DecodingTrust, a comprehensive trustworthiness benchmark for LLMs.

Peking University Boya Young Fellow; researches multi-agent reinforcement learning and AI alignment. Hosted Beijing-based academic alignment workshops bridging Chinese and Western researchers.

Nat Friedman

AI Grant; ex-GitHub CEO; sits on Meta superintelligence advisory

Investor and former GitHub CEO (2018–2021). Co-founder of AI Grant; advised the Vesuvius Challenge that used ML to read carbonized scrolls. Joined Meta's superintelligence advisory in 2024.

Daniel Gross

Andromeda Cluster co-founder; ex-Apple AI lead

Investor; former director of machine learning at Apple. Co-founder with Nat Friedman of AI Grant and Andromeda, a large-scale GPU cluster offered to AI startups.

Stanford assistant professor in CS and statistics. Member of the Center for Research on Foundation Models. Researches generalization and security properties of large models.

Princeton assistant professor of computer science. Previously a researcher at OpenAI before its scaling era. Focuses on language understanding and reasoning, and led work on the SWE-bench benchmark.

Professor at the University of Chicago and previously at ETH Zürich; co-founder of Together AI. Researches the systems substrate of large-scale ML training and inference.

TU Delft associate professor whose research connects software engineering, privacy, and the political economy of platforms. Argues large ML systems are functions of data extraction infrastructures, not isolated artefacts.

Ifeoma Ajunwa

Emory Law; workplace AI scholar

Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law and founder of the AI Decision-Making Research Program. Author of 'The Quantified Worker' (2023).

Researcher and policy analyst formerly at Data & Society and the World Economic Forum; senior adviser at the Center for Human Rights in Practice. Long-time advocate of human-rights-grounded AI governance.

President of ALLAI (Alliance for Human-Centered AI) and a member of the European Commission High-Level Expert Group on AI. Lead civil-society interlocutor on the EU AI Act.

Founder of the Eticas Foundation, a non-profit specializing in adversarial algorithmic audits. Repeatedly demonstrated bias in deployed government and platform systems in Europe and Latin America.

Managing director of the AI Collaborative at the Omidyar Network; long-standing funder and convener of civil-society AI policy work. Has championed 'data agency' framings in international forums.

DeepMind senior research scientist focused on language and reasoning. Previously co-led Cohere for AI's research arm; long-time NLP researcher.

Co-founder of NEAR Protocol; previously at Google Brain, where he co-authored 'Attention Is All You Need'.

Andy Jassy

Amazon CEO; AWS architect

CEO of Amazon since 2021; previously the architect of Amazon Web Services. Has framed Amazon's generative-AI strategy around Bedrock as a multi-model platform with substantial Anthropic investment.

Elham Tabassi

NIST Chief AI Advisor; AI Risk Management Framework

Chief AI Advisor at NIST and a principal architect of the NIST AI Risk Management Framework (2023). Steered NIST's role at the U.S. AI Safety Institute prior to its 2025 reorganization.

Jeffrey Ding

George Washington University; ChinAI newsletter

Assistant professor at George Washington University and author of the widely read ChinAI newsletter, which translates and contextualizes Chinese AI policy and research.

Independent tech writer best known for essays on AI, internet culture, and the post-Twitter information ecosystem; widely read in policy and product circles for clear-eyed coverage of Silicon Valley AI politics.

Nigel Shadbolt

Oxford / Open Data Institute co-founder

Principal of Jesus College, Oxford and co-founder of the Open Data Institute. Co-author with Roger Hampson of 'The Digital Ape' (2018); long-standing voice for democratized AI through open data.

Touro Law Center associate professor of law whose 2023 paper 'Tort Law as a Tool for Mitigating Catastrophic Risk from Artificial Intelligence' has become a key academic argument for using strict, joint-and-several liability to internalize AI risks.

Tim Wu

Columbia Law; ex-Biden NEC special assistant on tech competition

Columbia Law professor who coined 'net neutrality'; previously special assistant to President Biden on technology and competition policy. A central figure in the new-Brandeisian school of tech antitrust.

Matt Stoller

Open Markets Institute; BIG newsletter

Director of research at the Open Markets Institute and author of the BIG newsletter; consistent advocate of breaking up Big Tech and applying antitrust law aggressively to AI infrastructure and data.

Boaz Barak

Harvard; OpenAI safety; theoretical CS

Harvard theoretical CS professor on leave at OpenAI working on safety. Long-standing CS theorist whose recent posts have argued for taking AI safety problems seriously while criticizing parts of the doomer narrative.

Martin Wattenberg

Harvard; ex-Google PAIR; visualization for ML

Harvard professor and former senior research scientist at Google, where he co-founded the People + AI Research initiative. Long-time pioneer of interpretability through visualization.

Harvard professor and long-time collaborator with Martin Wattenberg; co-led Google's PAIR initiative on human-centered AI. Specialist in visualization and interaction for understanding complex ML systems.

UT Austin linguistics professor whose 2023 paper 'Dissociating language and thought in large language models' became a key reference for understanding the gap between LLM language fluency and reasoning competence.

Anna Rogers

IT University of Copenhagen; LLM benchmarking critique

IT University of Copenhagen associate professor; vocal critic of how LLM benchmarks are constructed and reported. Frequent NLP community commentator on contamination, leaderboard inflation, and method hygiene.

Northeastern University professor whose group has produced widely cited work on locating and editing factual associations in transformer language models (ROME, MEMIT).

Meredith Broussard

NYU journalism prof; 'Artificial Unintelligence', 'More Than a Glitch'

NYU professor and data journalist; author of 'Artificial Unintelligence' (2018) and 'More Than a Glitch' (2023). Argues that bias in AI is structural, not anomalous.

Julia Angwin

Investigative journalist; ex-ProPublica; The Markup founder

Investigative journalist; co-founded The Markup. Pulitzer winner whose 2016 ProPublica investigation 'Machine Bias' kicked off mainstream criminal-justice algorithm coverage.

Cynthia Breazeal

MIT Media Lab; social robotics; founder Jibo

MIT Media Lab professor and founder of Jibo. Has spent decades studying social robotics; now leads MIT's Personal Robots group and the Day of AI K-12 curriculum.

Ben Shneiderman

UMD emeritus; 'Human-Centered AI' framework

University of Maryland professor emeritus; pioneer of human-computer interaction; author of 'Human-Centered AI' (2022), which proposes a framework for keeping humans in control of high-stakes AI systems.

University of Toronto and Vector Institute assistant professor; researches privacy attacks, membership inference, machine unlearning, and ML supply-chain security.

Senior research scientist at Google DeepMind; lead author of Patchscopes, a unifying framework for using language models to inspect their own internal representations.

Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems; co-author of 'Fairness and Machine Learning' (free textbook). Recent work emphasizes the limits of static benchmarks under distribution shift and adaptive deployment.

Dustin Moskovitz

Asana / Open Phil; biggest AI safety funder

Co-founder of Facebook and Asana; with Cari Tuna, founded Good Ventures and is the principal funder behind Open Philanthropy, by far the largest private funder of long-term AI safety research.

Cari Tuna

Co-founder Good Ventures; Open Philanthropy chair

Co-founder with Dustin Moskovitz of Good Ventures and chair of Open Philanthropy. Former Wall Street Journal reporter; oversees one of the largest private grantmaking operations focused on existential risk.

Vinod Khosla

Khosla Ventures; early OpenAI investor

Founder of Khosla Ventures and Sun Microsystems; led the first major outside investment in OpenAI in 2019. Vocal techno-optimist on AI's economic and medical potential.

Hilary Greaves

Oxford GPI; longtermist moral philosopher

Oxford professor of philosophy and director of the Global Priorities Institute; key academic theorist of longtermism, the framework that animates much existential-risk-focused EA work.

Mathematician and existential risk researcher; former Future of Humanity Institute fellow whose work shaped early frameworks for prioritizing global catastrophic risks within the EA tradition.

Tegan Maharaj

HEC Montréal; ML safety, ecology, and ethics

Assistant professor at HEC Montréal whose research bridges machine learning safety, ecology, and the political economy of training data. Active in NeurIPS workshop organization on responsible ML.

Janelle Shane

AI Weirdness; optics researcher and AI humorist

Research scientist at Boulder Nonlinear Systems; author of the 'AI Weirdness' blog and the book 'You Look Like a Thing and I Love You'. Public communicator of how ML systems fail in unexpected, illuminating ways.

Pat Gelsinger

Former Intel CEO; chip-supply geopolitics

Former CEO of Intel (2021–2024); architected the company's foundry strategy and lobbied successfully for the U.S. CHIPS Act. Frequent commentator on the geopolitics of AI compute.

Richard S. Sutton

RL pioneer; 2024 Turing Award recipient

University of Alberta professor and DeepMind senior research scientist. With Andrew Barto, won the 2024 Turing Award for the foundations of reinforcement learning. Author of the canonical 'Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction' textbook and the influential 'Bitter Lesson' essay.

Deep technical · Field-leading · Symbolic era

UMass Amherst emeritus professor and co-developer of reinforcement learning with Richard Sutton. Co-recipient of the 2024 ACM Turing Award.

Deep technical · Field-leading · Symbolic era

John Jumper

DeepMind; AlphaFold lead; Nobel Prize 2024

Google DeepMind director who led the AlphaFold project that solved the protein folding problem. Awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Demis Hassabis and David Baker.

Jakub Pachocki

OpenAI Chief Scientist (since 2024)

OpenAI's chief scientist since May 2024, succeeding Ilya Sutskever. Former lead on the GPT-4 research effort.

Kyunghyun Cho

NYU professor; Genentech; encoder-decoder pioneer

NYU professor and Genentech principal investigator; co-author of the original encoder-decoder paper that underpins modern sequence models. Vocal critic of overhyped AGI claims and capability narratives.

Carnegie Mellon University Founders University Professor and former founding head of CMU's Machine Learning Department. Author of the canonical 'Machine Learning' (1997) textbook.

Open Philanthropy researcher who has worked on the economics, decision theory, and forecasting of advanced AI for nearly two decades. Best known for long-form analyses of AI takeoff and what-if-AGI-arrives-by-2030 scenarios.

K. Eric Drexler

FHI; nanotech pioneer; CAIS author

Pioneer of molecular nanotechnology and former FHI senior research fellow. Author of 'Reframing Superintelligence' (2019), which introduced 'Comprehensive AI Services' (CAIS) as an alternative to the unitary-agent framing.

Sergey Levine

UC Berkeley; robot learning, deep RL

UC Berkeley professor whose group has produced foundational work on robot learning, offline RL, and, since 2023, generalist robot foundation models like RT-2 and Open X-Embodiment.

Jakob Foerster

Oxford FLAIR lab; multi-agent RL

Oxford professor and head of the FLAIR lab; researches learning to cooperate and communicate in multi-agent reinforcement learning, including opponent shaping.

Mark Riedl

Georgia Tech; AI ethics and storytelling

Georgia Tech professor of interactive computing whose research spans narrative AI, AI ethics, and creative AI. Frequent public commentator on overhype and underexamined societal harms of generative AI.

Sean Carroll

Johns Hopkins / Santa Fe; physicist and Mindscape host

Theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins and the Santa Fe Institute; hosts Mindscape, where AI risk has been a recurring topic. Cautious about AGI timelines and tends toward measured skepticism on near-term existential framings.

Raia Hadsell

Google DeepMind director of robotics & research

Google DeepMind senior director whose research has spanned robotics, continual learning, and progressive networks. Helped lead DeepMind's robotics push and now oversees research strategy.

Mathematician and ML researcher; previously led the Microsoft Research team that produced the 'Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence' paper, then moved to OpenAI in 2024.

Nicholas Carlini

Anthropic adversarial-ML researcher; ex-Google Brain

Adversarial machine learning researcher widely cited for memorization, jailbreak, and privacy attacks on large models. Argues current LLM safety is unusually fragile compared to mature security fields.

MIT professor of computer science specializing in robust machine learning. Led the OpenAI Preparedness Team in 2023–24 to evaluate frontier model risks across CBRN, cyber, and persuasion domains.

David Deutsch

Oxford physicist; pioneer of quantum computing

Oxford physicist who proposed the universal quantum computer in 1985. Author of 'The Beginning of Infinity'; argues general intelligences are people in the moral sense and AI x-risk framings misread the open-ended nature of explanatory knowledge.

John Wentworth

Independent alignment researcher; natural abstractions

Independent alignment researcher who developed the 'natural abstractions hypothesis' as a framing for whether human concepts robustly transfer to learned representations.

Machine Intelligence Research Institute researcher who developed logical inductors (a formalism for assigning probabilities to mathematical statements over time) and Cartesian frames (a model of agent–environment boundaries).

MIRI researcher who co-authored the 'Embedded Agency' sequence outlining gaps in classical decision theory when an agent is part of the environment it reasons about.

DeepMind staff scientist and UCL professor who studies open-ended learning environments. Co-creator of Genie (action-controllable foundation worlds) and contributor to autocurricula research.

Jacob Andreas

MIT NLP; language models as belief reports

MIT EECS professor whose research has examined whether language models develop interpretable internal world-models and structured representations of belief.

AI researcher whose work has focused on grounding AI in real-world understanding. Founded DeepGrammar to build AI tools for children's media.

USC computer scientist whose work on internet infrastructure and AI energy has informed mainstream discussion of compute-and-climate tradeoffs.

UC Berkeley professor specializing in computer vision and multimodal AI. Widely-cited contributor to vision-language model research.

NYU Tandon professor and founding director of the Center for Responsible AI. Co-author of New York City's algorithmic accountability regulation.

Microsoft Research principal and Cornell professor whose foundational work on fairness in machine learning has shaped the field. Co-author of the canonical Fairness and Machine Learning textbook.

Sarah T. Roberts

UCLA professor; author of Behind the Screen

UCLA professor whose 2019 Behind the Screen documented the human labour behind commercial content moderation. Has extended this to generative AI training data.

Weizenbaum Institute researcher whose work has documented the exploitative conditions of AI data workers globally. Foundational research for the data-labour rights movement.

Former Amazon delivery driver and current AI Now Institute fellow who has written about AI surveillance in warehouse and gig work. Voice for AI-affected workers.

Scott Aaronson

UT Austin computer scientist; ex-OpenAI AI safety visitor

Quantum computing theorist at UT Austin. Took leave in 2022-2023 to work on OpenAI's Superalignment team, developing watermarking technology. Publicly skeptical of 'Yudkowskian' doom framings but engaged with alignment work.

Deep technical · Field-leading · Pre-deep-learning

Yejin Choi

University of Washington NLP professor; MacArthur fellow

MacArthur 'genius' grant recipient and University of Washington professor whose work on common-sense reasoning in language models has been widely influential.

Deep technical · Field-leading · Deep-learning rise

Civil rights attorney who founded the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. Has led legal challenges to AI-based surveillance in NYC and beyond.

Evan Greer

Fight for the Future director; digital rights activist

Director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights activist organisation. Has organised against AI surveillance, facial recognition, and algorithmic harm.

Edward Snowden

NSA whistleblower; AI surveillance critic

Former NSA contractor and famous surveillance whistleblower. Has written publicly about AI's implications for surveillance and intelligence work.

Andrew Yao

Tsinghua professor; Turing Award winner; Chinese AI institutional figure

Tsinghua professor and 2000 Turing Award winner. Founded the Yao Class at Tsinghua, which has produced many of China's leading AI researchers.

Quant trader and founder of DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab whose 2025 release of efficient, cheap reasoning models redrew the global AI cost curve.

Chinese Academy of Engineering academician who has shaped Chinese AI standards work and academic policy advice for two decades.

Cyril Ramaphosa

President of South Africa; AU AI strategy host

President of South Africa whose government chairs the African Union AI Continental Strategy work. Public framings position African AI sovereignty as joint project.

Xi Jinping

President of China; AI as national strategic priority

President of China whose 2017 New Generation AI Development Plan made AI a national strategic priority and committed China to AI leadership by 2030.

Policy / meta · Household name · Deep-learning rise

Narendra Modi

Prime Minister of India; AI for All initiative

Indian Prime Minister whose government has launched the IndiaAI Mission, a $1.25B sovereign AI initiative. Co-host of the 2026 AI Action Summit.

Policy / meta · Household name · Post-ChatGPT

Olaf Scholz

Former German Chancellor; AI infrastructure investments

Former German Chancellor who led the German AI investment plan and EU AI Act negotiations under the German EU presidency.

Policy / meta · Household name · Post-ChatGPT

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

President of Brazil; AI sovereignty advocate

President of Brazil whose government has launched a Brazilian AI Plan, positioning Brazil as a Global South AI sovereignty leader.

Josephine Teo

Singapore Minister for Digital Development and Information

Singapore Minister leading the country's AI strategy. Singapore's AI Verify and AI Safety Institute are major contributions to ASEAN AI governance.

Singapore-based AI policy researcher contributing to AI Verify Foundation, the standard-setting body for ASEAN AI testing. Voice for ASEAN AI governance.

Carnegie Endowment researcher tracking Chinese AI policy and research outputs. Bridges Chinese-language sources to US/EU policy audiences.

Atlantic deputy editor whose long-form 2023 piece on Sam Altman set the template for serious mainstream coverage of AI safety questions.

Atlantic associate editor whose long features have framed AI for mainstream literary audiences. Skeptical of AI hype while taking the technology seriously.

Ina Fried

Axios chief technology correspondent

Axios chief tech correspondent whose AI+Tech newsletter is required reading in DC AI policy circles. Bridges Beltway and Silicon Valley.

Will Knight

Wired senior writer; AI safety beat reporter

Wired senior writer covering AI. Has reported extensively on the AI safety community, frontier labs, and the politics of AI governance.

Wired senior writer based in Europe whose AI reporting from Brussels has been a significant English-language source on EU AI Act implementation.

Buffalo geography professor who has written critically on AI's role in climate solutionism. Author of After Geoengineering. Frames AI-and-climate framings as often misleading.

Tomaso Poggio

MIT computational neuroscience pioneer

MIT professor whose work on computational neuroscience and learning theory predates and underlies much of modern deep learning. Long-time bridge between neuroscience and AI.

Patricia Churchland

UC San Diego neurophilosopher

UC San Diego philosopher of mind whose 'neurophilosophy' framework has informed AI consciousness debates. Argues mind is brain in a strong sense.

External-domain expert · Field-leading · Symbolic era

Anil Seth

University of Sussex neuroscientist; consciousness researcher

Sussex neuroscientist whose work on the predictive processing model of consciousness has informed AI consciousness debates. Author of Being You.

External-domain expert · Field-leading · Deep-learning rise

Doris Tsao

Caltech / UC Berkeley neuroscientist; face cells researcher

Caltech-trained neuroscientist who discovered that single neurons in the temporal lobe encode specific visual features. Her work has informed thinking about how AI representations relate to brain representations.

External-domain expert · Field-leading · Deep-learning rise

Anita Allen

UPenn law professor; privacy and AI

University of Pennsylvania law professor whose work on privacy theory has informed AI privacy frameworks. Former chair of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

Stockholm University researcher whose work on AI and gendered technology has informed Nordic AI policy.

Agnes Callard

University of Chicago philosopher; aspiration theorist

University of Chicago philosopher whose work on aspiration and value-development has been applied by some AI ethics writers to the question of how AIs might come to acquire values.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

NYU philosopher; cosmopolitanism theorist

Princeton-and-NYU philosopher whose work on cosmopolitanism and identity has informed AI ethics frameworks. NYT Ethicist columnist.

Martha Nussbaum

University of Chicago philosopher; capability approach co-founder

University of Chicago philosopher who with Sen developed the capability approach. Her ten central capabilities framework has informed AI ethics work on human flourishing.

Amartya Sen

Harvard economist; capability approach pioneer

Harvard economist and 1998 Nobel laureate. His capability approach has informed AI ethics frameworks that focus on human flourishing rather than just narrow technical metrics.

External-domain expert · Household name · Pioneer

Esther Duflo

MIT economist; 2019 Nobel laureate (with Banerjee)

MIT development economist and 2019 Nobel laureate. Argues AI applications in development must be empirically tested through RCTs, not assumed effective.

External-domain expert · Household name · Deep-learning rise

Abhijit Banerjee

MIT economist; 2019 Nobel laureate

MIT development economist and 2019 Nobel laureate. With Esther Duflo has written on AI's effect on global development. Skeptical of AI-as-development-shortcut framings.

Joseph Stiglitz

Columbia economist; Nobel laureate

Columbia economist and 2001 Nobel laureate. Has written on AI as a labour-market and inequality phenomenon, arguing it accelerates rent extraction unless redirected.

External-domain expert · Household name · Pioneer

Diane Coyle

Cambridge economist; Bennett Professor of Public Policy

Cambridge economist whose Bennett Institute focuses on the economics of digital platforms and AI. Public voice for measurement and macroeconomic framings of AI policy.

Masayoshi Son

SoftBank CEO; major AI investor

SoftBank chair and CEO. Co-investor in Stargate and major financial backer of OpenAI. Has predicted superintelligence by 2035.

Tech executive who served on the OpenAI board and voted with Helen Toner to remove Sam Altman in November 2023. Now a vocal critic of self-regulation by frontier labs.

Stewart Brand

Long Now Foundation; Whole Earth Catalog founder

Long Now Foundation co-founder whose Whole Earth Catalog inspired generations of tech thinkers. Has commented on AI from a long-now perspective: civilisation-scale time horizons.

External-domain expert · Household name · Symbolic era

Tim O'Reilly

O'Reilly Media founder; tech-publishing veteran

O'Reilly Media founder and long-time tech publisher who has written extensively on AI as economic and political phenomenon. Author of WTF? and recent essays on AI antitrust.

Policy / meta · Household name · Deep-learning rise

Alex 'Sandy' Pentland

MIT Connection Science director; computational social science

MIT professor and founder of computational social science. Author of Honest Signals and Social Physics. Public voice for data-driven society perspective on AI.

Sandra Wachter

Oxford Internet Institute; AI law and ethics

Oxford Internet Institute professor whose work on the 'right to explanation' has shaped EU AI law. Frequent contributor to UK and EU AI policy debates.

Iyad Rahwan

Max Planck Institute Berlin; Moral Machine experiment

Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Led the Moral Machine experiment crowd-sourcing self-driving-car ethics. Public voice on machine behaviour.

Deep technical · Field-leading · Deep-learning rise

Carl Shapiro

UC Berkeley economist; antitrust and innovation

Berkeley economist who specialised in antitrust and innovation. Has commented on AI antitrust questions, particularly the OpenAI-Microsoft relationship.

Princeton anthropology professor whose work on race, media, and technology has informed AI ethics from a sociological perspective.

CMU professor who created XGBoost and TVM. Foundational figure in AI infrastructure tooling.

UW computer architecture professor and OctoML CEO. Public voice on AI hardware and the economics of compute, particularly the open-source compiler ecosystem.

Luc Julia

Renault Chief Scientist; Siri co-creator

Co-creator of Apple's Siri. Now Renault's chief scientist. Public voice for skeptical, deployment-grade AI framings.

Former CIA officer and Facebook integrity lead. Now at Cybersecurity for Democracy at NYU. Argues platform-and-AI accountability is national-security infrastructure.

Former Facebook civic integrity team lead who left in 2021. Now at Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Public voice on platform-and-AI integrity.

Joichi Ito

Former MIT Media Lab director; AI ethics commentator

Former MIT Media Lab director who has written extensively on AI as societal infrastructure. Author of Whiplash and co-founder of Digital Garage.

Luciano Floridi

Yale digital ethics professor; AI ethics philosopher

Italian philosopher who founded the field of philosophy of information. Director of the Yale Digital Ethics Center. One of the most published academics on AI ethics.

Policy / meta · Field-leading · Pre-deep-learning

Birmingham professor of law, ethics and informatics whose work on algorithmic accountability has shaped UK and EU policy frameworks. Frames AI governance as a regulatory innovation problem.

Kate Devlin

King's College London; AI and intimacy researcher

King's College London computer scientist and author of Turned On (2018), studying AI sex robots and the intersection of AI with human intimacy.

Oxford machine learning professor co-author of the 2013 'Future of Employment' paper that estimated 47% of US jobs were at high risk of automation. Continues to publish on AI's labour-market effects.

Dame Wendy Hall

Southampton professor; UK AI policy author

University of Southampton professor and co-chair of the UK Government's 2017 AI Review (with Jérôme Pesenti). Long-time architect of UK AI strategy.

UCL Pro-Vice-Provost for Innovation and Enterprise. Royal Academy of Engineering AI work; bridges academic engineering and policy on AI in critical infrastructure.

Co-Executive Director of AI Now Institute. Researches the political economy of AI; has published on whether 'AI safety' is a frame that benefits incumbents.

Anu Bradford

Columbia Law professor; 'The Brussels Effect' author

Columbia law professor whose Brussels Effect framework documents how EU regulation propagates globally. Foundational reference for understanding EU AI Act influence.

Tübingen law professor whose work on EU AI law has shaped the EU AI Act's interaction with GDPR. Trained both legally and technically.

Brad Templeton

Long-time tech journalist; self-driving cars critic

Long-time tech journalist and EFF founding board member who has been a leading voice on autonomous vehicle policy and AI safety in transport.

Sasha Costanza-Chock

Algorithmic Justice League; design justice author

Algorithmic Justice League researcher and author of Design Justice (2020). Argues participatory design is a structural prerequisite for AI that doesn't reproduce systemic harm.

Cambridge anthropologist whose work on the religious framings of AI has documented how AI is increasingly described in spiritual or religious terms.

Kashmir Hill

NYT tech reporter; facial recognition and privacy

New York Times tech reporter whose investigation of Clearview AI led to mainstream understanding of facial recognition surveillance. Author of Your Face Belongs to Us (2023).

MIT researcher whose work on recommender systems and platform incentive design has been cited in mainstream AI policy debates.

BU computer vision professor whose work on transferable AI representations and adversarial robustness has shaped the engineering side of AI safety.

Ali Rahimi

Google Brain ML researcher; 'Alchemy' speech

Google Brain researcher whose 2017 NeurIPS Test of Time speech labelled deep learning 'alchemy' for its lack of theoretical foundations. Influential framing in subsequent ML rigor debates.

Katy Börner

Indiana University; data and information visualisation

Indiana University Distinguished Professor whose Atlas of Knowledge and other visualisation work has shaped how researchers and policymakers see the AI research field at scale.

Yuk Hui

City University of Hong Kong philosopher; cosmotechnics

Hong Kong-based philosopher whose 'cosmotechnics' framework argues different cultures have different relationships to technology, and globalised AI is a particular philosophical imposition.

Hilary Putnam

Harvard philosopher (1926–2016); functionalism

Harvard philosopher who in the 1960s introduced functionalism, the position that mental states are functional, not material, that subsequently became the foundation of computationalist theories of mind.

Donna Haraway

UC Santa Cruz emerita; 'A Cyborg Manifesto'

Cyborg-feminism theorist whose 1985 'A Cyborg Manifesto' anticipated debates about hybrid human-machine identity. Foundational reference for thinking about post-AI selfhood.

Hubert Dreyfus

Berkeley phenomenologist; AI critic (1929–2017)

UC Berkeley phenomenologist whose 1972 'What Computers Can't Do' was the first serious philosophical critique of symbolic AI. Foundational reference for AI-skeptic arguments grounded in embodied cognition.

John Searle

UC Berkeley philosopher; Chinese Room Argument

Berkeley philosopher whose 1980 'Chinese Room' thought experiment is the canonical argument that symbol manipulation alone cannot produce understanding.

External-domain expert · Household name · Pioneer

Daniel Dennett

Philosopher; 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea' (1942–2024)

Tufts philosopher who spent his career arguing for naturalistic, computational theories of mind. Foundational reference for thinking about AI consciousness.

External-domain expert · Household name · Pioneer

Thomas Nagel

NYU philosopher; 'What is it like to be a bat'

NYU philosopher whose 1974 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' paper became the canonical statement of the consciousness question. Foundational reference for AI consciousness debates.

External-domain expert · Household name · Pioneer

Andy Clark

Sussex philosopher; extended mind theorist

Philosopher of mind whose 'extended mind' framework argues cognition extends into tools and environment. Foundational reference for thinking about AI as cognitive extension.

Ray Kurzweil

Futurist; The Singularity Is Near (1948–)

Futurist whose 2005 The Singularity Is Near predicted human-machine merger by 2045. Long-time public face of optimistic technological-singularity framings.

External-domain expert · Household name · Symbolic era

Carnegie Mellon robotics pioneer who in 1988 wrote Mind Children predicting robotic descendants of humanity. Foundational reference for AI succession debates.

Donald Knuth

Computer science pioneer; The Art of Computer Programming

Stanford emeritus professor whose The Art of Computer Programming has been the canonical CS reference for sixty years. Has voiced cautious skepticism about LLM-based AGI claims.

Deep technical · Household name · Pioneer

Alan Kay

Object-oriented programming and personal computing pioneer

Pioneer of object-oriented programming and the Dynabook concept. Long-time critic of how the personal computing revolution was actually deployed; extends this critique to AI.

Deep technical · Household name · Pioneer

Douglas Engelbart

Pioneer of human-computer interaction (1925–2013)

SRI engineer who delivered the 1968 'Mother of All Demos' inventing the mouse, hypertext, and the conceptual foundations of personal computing. His framework: technology should augment, not replace, human intellect.

Deep technical · Household name · Pioneer

Claude Shannon

Information theory founder (1916–2001)

Bell Labs and MIT mathematician who founded information theory in 1948. The mathematical infrastructure of all modern AI traces back to Shannon entropy and channel capacity.

Deep technical · Household name · Pioneer

Ada Lovelace

First programmer; analytical engine theorist (1815–1852)

Mathematician whose notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine made her the first computer programmer. Foundational reference for thinking about machines and intelligence.

Judea Pearl

UCLA professor; Bayesian networks and causality pioneer

UCLA computer scientist who founded Bayesian networks and the modern theory of causation. Author of The Book of Why (2018). Public skeptic of pure-correlation deep learning.

Deep technical · Household name · Symbolic era

Joseph Weizenbaum

ELIZA inventor; AI ethics pioneer (1923–2008)

German-American MIT computer scientist who created ELIZA in 1966 and immediately became a critic of the AI hype that followed. Author of Computer Power and Human Reason (1976).

Deep technical · Field-leading · Pioneer

Alan Turing

Founder of theoretical computer science (1912–1954)

British mathematician and codebreaker who founded computer science. His 1950 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' paper proposed the Turing Test and inaugurated the philosophy of AI.

Deep technical · Household name · Pioneer

John McCarthy

Coined 'artificial intelligence' (1927–2011)

Stanford computer scientist who coined the term 'artificial intelligence' in 1955 and convened the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop that founded the field.

Deep technical · Household name · Pioneer

Marvin Minsky

MIT AI lab co-founder (1927–2016); 'Society of Mind'

MIT AI lab co-founder and one of the foundational figures in artificial intelligence. Author of The Society of Mind. Foundational reference for thinking about modular intelligence.

Deep technical · Household name · Pioneer

Doug Lenat

Cycorp founder; symbolic AI pioneer (1950–2023)

Founder of Cycorp and pioneer of symbolic-knowledge approaches to AI. Spent 40 years building Cyc, a hand-curated common-sense knowledge base. Public skeptic of pure-LLM paths to AGI.

Deep technical · Field-leading · Pioneer

Bruce Schneier

Security guru; AI security and democracy critic

Cryptographer and security writer whose blog and books have shaped public understanding of digital security for two decades. Has extended his framework to AI security and democracy.

Ross Anderson

Cambridge security professor; security engineering

Cambridge security engineering professor (1956–2024) whose textbook Security Engineering has been the canonical reference for digital security. Wrote extensively on the security implications of AI.

Tracy Chou

Block Party founder; tech accountability advocate

Engineer who founded Block Party (an anti-harassment tool) and has been a leading voice on tech accountability, including Big Tech AI deployment.

Former Google Brain RL researcher and ML educator whose Sorta Insightful blog has long been a thoughtful inside-view voice on RL and AI safety.

Shawn Wang (swyx)

Smol AI founder; Latent Space podcast

Engineer-and-investor who runs the Latent Space podcast, a major venue for AI engineering and product discussions. Founder of Smol AI.

Cassidy Williams

GitHub developer advocate; AI in coding

Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub. Public voice for the AI-coding revolution, particularly around GitHub Copilot and the future of developer skills.

Sneha Revanur

Founder of Encode Justice; Gen-Z AI activism

Stanford-bound activist who founded Encode Justice as a youth-led AI accountability organisation. Public voice for Gen-Z perspectives on AI policy.

Runs the Partnership on AI, a multistakeholder organisation that includes frontier labs, civil society, and academia. Helps coordinate industry-civil-society work on responsible AI.

Heritage Foundation senior tech-policy researcher. Conservative voice on AI regulation; has published reports on AI's national security implications and on conservative responses to Big Tech.

Tony Fadell

iPod creator; Nest founder; AI hardware critic

Hardware design legend who created the iPod and founded Nest. Has publicly criticised the LLM-everywhere approach and called for transparent, specialised AI systems.

Commentator · Household name · Post-ChatGPT

Joëlle Pineau

Cohere Chief AI Officer; former Meta VP of AI Research

McGill RL professor who ran Meta's AI research and championed Meta's open-source AI policy. Departed Meta in April 2025; joined Cohere in 2025.

Deep technical · Field-leading · Deep-learning rise

Jonathan Haidt

NYU Stern professor; The Anxious Generation

NYU Stern social psychologist whose 2024 book The Anxious Generation links smartphone-and-social-media exposure to youth mental health declines. Has extended his framework to oppose AI companions for children.

Sherry Turkle

MIT social scientist; AI and loneliness researcher

MIT social scientist who has studied human-machine relationships for decades. Author of Alone Together (2011). Argues AI companions are an 'assault on empathy'.

Lawrence Lessig

Harvard Law professor; Creative Commons founder

Long-time digital rights and copyright scholar. Founded Creative Commons. In 2024, argued some AI model weights are too dangerous to release openly even given his pro-openness defaults.

Vivek Ramaswamy

Former US presidential candidate; AI deregulation advocate

Former 2024 US Republican presidential candidate. Public advocate for radical AI deregulation.

Commentator · Household name · Post-ChatGPT

Former DeepMind policy researcher who joined Goldman Sachs. Bridges frontier-lab governance and capital-markets perspective on AI.

Microsoft engineer who has written and spoken on AI's sustainability footprint. Public voice for green-software practices in AI deployment.

Cambridge ML professor and Alan Turing Institute programme director. Bridges technical ML and policy work; has advised the UK government on AI strategy.

Oxford computer scientist whose work has shaped UK ICO and EU AI privacy regulation. Translates technical AI questions into legal frameworks.

Rana el Kaliouby

Affectiva co-founder; emotion AI pioneer

Egyptian-American computer scientist who co-founded Affectiva. Pioneer of emotion AI. Argues affective AI deployment requires distinct ethical frameworks.

Kara Swisher

Tech journalist; On with Kara Swisher podcast

Veteran tech journalist who co-founded Recode and AllThingsD. Long-running interviewer of frontier AI executives. Public framing: AI executives are not to be trusted as their own regulators.

Policy / meta · Household name · Post-ChatGPT

Stephen Witt

Author of 'The Thinking Machine' (NVIDIA history)

Journalist and author whose 2025 book The Thinking Machine documents NVIDIA's rise as the AI infrastructure provider. Major reference for AI compute history.

Stephen Marche

Author; AI and writers' rights

Canadian writer who has written extensively on AI and the future of writing in The Atlantic and elsewhere. Public voice in the writers'-rights conversation about AI training data.

Bret Taylor

Chairman of OpenAI; co-CEO of Sierra

Long-time tech executive (former Salesforce co-CEO, Twitter chairman) who became OpenAI board chair after the November 2023 governance crisis. Co-founded Sierra, an AI agent company.

Policy / meta · Household name · Scaling era

Scott Galloway

NYU Stern professor; tech-business commentator

NYU Stern marketing professor and Pivot podcast co-host. Influential tech-business commentator who has framed AI primarily through antitrust and platform-power lenses.

Vint Cerf

Internet co-creator; Google Chief Internet Evangelist

TCP/IP co-creator. Has written and spoken extensively on AI's implications for the internet, particularly around content provenance and trust.

Deep technical · Household name · Pioneer

Researcher who has worked on biosecurity and AI x-risk forecasting. Active contributor to forecasting communities and Open Philanthropy-affiliated work.

Founder of Pirate Wires, a contrarian tech newsletter. Influential voice in Silicon Valley anti-doomer / accelerationist culture.

Matthew Yglesias

Slow Boring; political economy of AI

Influential journalist and Substack writer. His writing on AI focuses on labour markets, antitrust, and the political economy of regulation.

Tech journalist whose Big Technology newsletter and podcast have become major venues for in-depth interviews with frontier AI executives.

Azeem Azhar

Exponential View founder; tech-economy analyst

Founder of Exponential View, a leading newsletter on technology and economy. Argues exponential technologies (including AI) require exponential institutional adaptation.

Writer and cultural critic whose Substack has been a leading skeptical voice on AI hype, particularly on AI in education and journalism.

Ross Douthat

NYT columnist; conservative AI commentator

New York Times opinion columnist whose writing has covered AI from a conservative-religious perspective, focusing on questions of meaning and human dignity.

Trade economist and founder of Nextrade Group. Argues AI governance must be embedded in international trade frameworks, not as a separate digital regime.

Eliza Strickland

IEEE Spectrum senior editor; AI Spectrum

IEEE Spectrum senior editor whose technical journalism on AI has been a reference for engineering audiences. Edits IEEE's AI coverage.

Danielle Allen

Harvard political theorist; Allen Lab on AI and democracy

Harvard James Bryant Conant University Professor and political theorist. Her Allen Lab on AI and democracy works on AI governance grounded in democratic theory.

Creator of PyTorch, the dominant deep-learning framework. Public voice on the open-source AI ecosystem.

Cornell Tech NLP professor who also works at Hugging Face. Influential educator and contributor to the open-research culture.

Founder of Hume AI, which builds models trained on emotional expression. Argues empathic AI is a structurally different deployment problem than generic LLMs.

ETH Zurich professor focused on adversarial ML, privacy attacks, and red-teaming. Has documented many of the practical security failures in deployed AI.

AI policy researcher at the Future of Life Institute who has analysed comparative AI legislation across the US, EU, and other jurisdictions.

French roboticist who chaired the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. Long-time architect of European AI ethics frameworks.

Doina Precup

McGill professor; DeepMind Montreal lead

Reinforcement learning pioneer at McGill and DeepMind. One of the most prominent women in the technical core of RL research.

Indian philosopher of science and technology whose work on the philosophy of mind and AI has influenced the Indian responsible-AI conversation.

Anthropic policy team member working on EU regulatory engagement. Helps translate Anthropic's safety commitments into European regulatory language.

Marshall McLuhan

Media theorist; foundational AI-and-media reference

Canadian media theorist whose 'the medium is the message' has become foundational to thinking about how AI as a medium reshapes the messages it carries. Included for foundational discourse.

Senior policy researcher at Longview Philanthropy who works on AI governance funding and strategy. Bridges philosophy and policy.

Former Meta VP of Responsible AI who built Meta's responsible AI infrastructure during the misinformation and fairness reckoning. Now at Apple's ML group.

Manages the AI:Futures and Responsibility programme at Cambridge's CSER. Has authored multiple AI policy reports for UK government bodies.

DeepMind senior research scientist focused on AI ethics and value alignment from a political philosophy perspective. Author of the influential 'Artificial Intelligence, Values and Alignment' paper.

Matt Turek

DARPA AI Forward program lead

DARPA Information Innovation Office program manager who leads the AI Forward initiative on assured autonomy and the integration of AI into national security systems.

Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk researcher whose 'malicious use of AI' report has shaped policy thinking on AI security risks. Co-founded the Future of Life Institute.

Wes McKinney

Pandas creator; Posit/RStudio data infrastructure

Creator of pandas, the canonical Python data-analysis library. Has written on AI infrastructure: how dataframes, training pipelines, and orchestration shape what AI is possible.

Lucy Suchman

Lancaster professor emerita; AI and military robotics

Lancaster anthropologist whose work on situated action and on military AI has shaped academic thinking on autonomous weapons. Long-time critic of overconfident AI claims.

Creator of zstd compression. Has commented on the substantial energy and infrastructure costs underlying frontier AI training, drawing on compression-theory perspective.

Faculty AI's safety research lead, working with frontier labs and the UK AI Safety Institute on evaluations.

Tony Blair

Former UK Prime Minister; Tony Blair Institute on AI

Former UK PM whose Tony Blair Institute has become a leading mainstream voice for AI governance, particularly on AI as a productivity-and-public-services lever for governments.

Policy / meta · Household name · Post-ChatGPT

Foreign correspondent whose 2021 book documented Chinese AI-powered surveillance in Xinjiang. Frames AI surveillance as a present authoritarian threat.