University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) was founded in 1883 and is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. As of fall 2025 it enrolls approximately 55,000 students and employs over 4,800 faculty members. In FY2025 it spent $1.37 billion on externally funded research across all disciplines. The most directly AI-safety-relevant program is the AI+Human Objectives Initiative (AHOI), which is building a community of researchers at UT Austin focused on ensuring that the social impact of advanced artificial intelligence is aligned with human goals and values. AHOI draws 13 faculty members from Computer Science (Brad Knox, Peter Stone, Scott Aaronson), Philosophy (Harvey Lederman, Christian Tarsney, Josh Dever, Mark Budolfson), Linguistics (Kyle Mahowald, Jessy Li), and several other departments. AHOI is funded by Open Philanthropy and has also received a grant from Coefficient Giving. Brad Knox, a co-lead of AHOI, is notable for his doctoral research that pioneered the reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) approach now central to large language model training. A second AI safety research thread is led by Scott Aaronson, who holds the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computer Science and directs the Quantum Information Center. After a two-year leave (2022-2024) working at OpenAI on the theoretical foundations of AI safety, Aaronson returned to UT Austin to establish a research group studying topics at the intersection of AI safety and computational complexity theory, including interpretability of neural networks, cryptographic backdoors, and out-of-distribution generalization. Open Philanthropy awarded $1,650,000 over three years to support this group. UT Austin also hosts Good Systems, a cross-campus grand challenge initiative that has operated for approximately six years and focuses on developing ethical human-AI systems. Good Systems received a $1 million investment from MITRE and involves faculty and students from more than two dozen UT schools and units. In March 2026 UT Austin hosted the inaugural Texas Symposium on Machine Learning, Responsible AI, and Robotics, which drew over 600 participants from academia, industry, government, and nonprofits. The Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML), an NSF AI Institute headquartered at UT Austin, conducts foundational ML research to improve accuracy and reliability of AI models, with over $20 million in NSF funding and collaborations with the University of Washington, Stanford, UCLA, and Microsoft Research.