Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence

The Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence (RDI) is a multidisciplinary, campus-wide initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, established around 2021. It is co-directed by Professor Dawn Song (EECS, known for her work in AI safety, security, and decentralization) and Professor Christine Parlour (Haas School of Business, finance). The center draws on faculty from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering, Haas School of Business, and School of Law, as well as affiliate faculty from institutions including Imperial College London, ETH Zurich, UIUC, and NYU. RDI is organized around three pillars. The research pillar covers agentic AI foundations (reasoning, planning, reinforcement learning, self-improvement), AI safety and security (robustness, adversarial resilience, oversight, alignment, control, interpretability, monitoring), agentic AI applications (web agents, coding agents, multi-agent systems), AI for cybersecurity, program synthesis, and decentralization technology (cryptography, DeFi, privacy, zero-knowledge proofs). The education pillar includes popular MOOCs on LLM agents and agentic AI that have enrolled over 40,000 learners globally, as well as a Zero Knowledge Proofs MOOC and a certificate program in Decentralization, AI and Web3. The community and entrepreneurship pillar is anchored by the Berkeley Xcelerator, which has incubated over 110 teams with more than $650 million in follow-on funding secured. RDI has received significant external funding, including a $5 million grant from the Algorand Foundation in 2022 to establish the Berkeley RDI-Imperial College London Algorand Center of Excellence focused on scalability, privacy, and responsible decentralized finance. Annual summits on decentralization and AI and agentic AI have drawn thousands of attendees from industry and academia. The center's Discord community has grown to approximately 14,000 members, and its hackathons and competitions have attracted over 1,300 teams from more than 100 countries with prize pools exceeding $1.5 million. As a UC Berkeley research center, RDI does not operate as an independent nonprofit; it is funded through university channels, grants, and industry partnerships.