Arizona State University

Arizona State University (ASU) was founded in 1885 as the Territorial Normal School and has grown into one of the largest public research universities in the United States, with a primary campus in Tempe, Arizona and additional campuses in downtown Phoenix, Polytechnic, and the West Valley. As of 2024-2025, ASU enrolls over 160,000 students annually and employs over 5,600 faculty members across more than 400 undergraduate and 450 graduate degree programs. ASU conducts over $1 billion in annual research expenditures (FY2024) and holds an endowment of approximately $1.59 billion. The university describes itself as the most innovative university in the United States and operates under a "New American University" model emphasizing broad access and societal impact. In the domain of AI safety and governance of emerging technologies, ASU operates several relevant units. The School for the Future of Innovation in Society (SFIS), housed in the College of Global Futures, is a transdisciplinary academic unit focused on responsible innovation, anticipatory governance, and the societal dimensions of emerging technologies. It houses the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) and offers an AI and Society Fellowship. Faculty such as Andrew Maynard (Risk Innovation Lab) have contributed widely to AI risk and governance discourse. The Center for Nanotechnology in Society at ASU (CNS-ASU), originally funded by a $6.2 million NSF award in 2005, became a global leader in real-time technology assessment and anticipatory governance frameworks for emerging technologies. Its methods and frameworks have influenced how policymakers and researchers approach oversight of transformative technologies. The Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law hosts the annual Governance of Emerging Technologies and Science (GETS) Conference, now in its 13th year, bringing together scholars and policymakers on AI governance, autonomous weapons, synthetic biology, and related fields. The law school also produced a Soft Law Governance of AI project that catalogued and analyzed over 600 soft law mechanisms directed at AI regulation. Gary Marchant, faculty director of the Center for Law, Science and Innovation, has been a prominent voice in AI existential risk discussions. On the technical side, ASU's School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence (SCAI), within the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, pursues research in machine learning, cybersecurity, and adversarial robustness. In 2022, Open Philanthropy awarded ASU a $200,000 grant for adversarial robustness research led by Professor Chaowei Xiao; the remaining funds were subsequently transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison when Xiao moved there in 2024. In 2024, ASU became the first higher education institution to partner with OpenAI, launching a university-wide AI Innovation Challenge that has activated nearly 500 projects. ASU also employs a Principled Innovation framework for AI governance internally, with a Faculty Ethics Committee on AI Technology and a university-wide Digital Trust initiative.