Arizona State University (ASU) is a public research university headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, founded in 1885. With over 160,000 enrolled students and 5,600+ faculty, ASU is one of the largest universities in the U.S. and a top-100 research institution by expenditure. Relevant to AI safety and x-risk, ASU houses the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, which focuses on anticipatory governance and responsible innovation; the Center for Nanotechnology in Society, which pioneered real-time technology assessment frameworks; and the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, which runs a leading Governance of Emerging Technologies conference and a Soft Law AI Governance project cataloguing 600+ AI governance mechanisms. The university has also received Open Philanthropy funding for adversarial robustness research in machine learning.
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Theory of Change
ASU's approach to reducing AI and emerging technology risks operates primarily through education, governance research, and policy influence. By training students and researchers in anticipatory governance, responsible innovation, and AI law, ASU builds institutional capacity across government, industry, and civil society to identify and manage technology risks before they become crises. Research centers like SFIS and CNS-ASU develop and disseminate frameworks for real-time technology assessment and stakeholder engagement, enabling more agile and anticipatory regulation. The law school's governance research, including soft law analysis and the GETS conference, provides policymakers with practical tools and normative frameworks for AI oversight. On the technical side, adversarial robustness and trustworthy AI research aims to make AI systems safer by design. Collectively, ASU's theory of change emphasizes upstream engagement with emerging technologies, cross-disciplinary integration of social and technical expertise, and broad dissemination of governance knowledge to shape the institutions that will govern transformative AI.
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from Open Philanthropy
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- Last Updated
- Apr 2, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC
- Created
- Mar 20, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC