person

Anca Dragan

UC Berkeley professor; Google DeepMind AI safety lead

Roboticist who studies human-robot interaction and AI alignment from the assistance-games angle. Leads AI safety at Google DeepMind and signed the Statement on AI Risk.

current Director of AI Safety and Alignment, Google DeepMind; Associate Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley

homepage

Profile

expertise

Frontier builder

Currently or recently led training, architecture, or safety work on a frontier model. Hands on the loss curve.

Google DeepMind safety lead; UC Berkeley professor on leave. Deep technical work on human-robot interaction, value alignment, and AI safety. Hands-on at frontier scale.

recognition

Field-leading

Widely known inside the AI and AI-safety community. Appears repeatedly in top venues, podcasts, or governance forums. Not a household name to outsiders.

Recognised in robotics and ML safety communities. TIME 100 AI 2024.

vintage

Deep-learning rise

Came up post-AlexNet. ImageNet, AlphaGo, transformer paper. DeepMind, Google Brain, FAIR establish the modern lab template.

PhD 2015 (CMU). Berkeley 2015+. Google DeepMind safety lead 2024. Career is deep-learning era.

Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.

Strategy positions

Alignment firstendorses

Solve technical alignment before capability thresholds close

Argues alignment research should be foundational, using assistance games and reward modelling as central tools.

Robots and AI assistants need to infer and defer to human preferences, not optimise rigid objectives.

§ paperCooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning· NeurIPS· 2017· faithful paraphrase

Existential primacyendorses

Extinction/disempowerment risk overrides ordinary cost-benefit

Signatory to the Statement on AI Risk.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

¶ articleStatement on AI Risk· Center for AI Safety· 2023-05-30· direct quote

Closest strategy neighbours

by jaccard overlap

Other people whose strategy tags overlap with Anca Dragan's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.

Andrew G. Barto
shared 2 · J=1.00
RL co-founder; 2024 Turing Award recipient
Joseph Carlsmith
shared 2 · J=1.00
Open Philanthropy researcher; 'Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?'
Stuart Russell
shared 2 · J=1.00
Co-author of the standard AI textbook; leading critic of the 'standard model' of AI
Nick Bostrom
shared 2 · J=0.67
Author of Superintelligence; founded Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute
Aaron Courville
shared 1 · J=0.50
Université de Montréal; Deep Learning textbook co-author
Adam Jermyn
shared 1 · J=0.50
Anthropic; previously astrophysics

Record last updated 2026-04-24.