University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA

https://siebelschool.illinois.edu/

matureFounded 1867

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is one of the top-ranked public universities in the United States, with a Siebel School of Computing and Data Science that houses multiple AI safety-relevant research programs. Key groups include the FOCAL Lab (formal verification and certified AI, funded in part by Open Philanthropy), Bo Li's Secure Learning Lab (trustworthy ML, adversarial robustness), and Daniel Kang's research on AI agent cybersecurity benchmarks. Two UIUC faculty were selected for the Schmidt Sciences $10M AI Safety Science Program in 2025, and the university launched the ASKS Center (Capital One-funded, $3M over five years) focused on generative AI safety and security.

Funding Details

Annual Budget: -
Monthly Burn Rate: -
Current Runway: -
Funding Goal: -
Funding Raised to Date: -
Fiscal Sponsor: -

Theory of Change

UIUC's AI safety-relevant researchers pursue multiple complementary paths to reducing risk. The FOCAL Lab pursues formal verification approaches — proving mathematically that neural networks satisfy safety properties, which could enable reliable deployment in high-stakes settings. Bo Li's group works on adversarial robustness and red-teaming infrastructure so that dangerous capabilities in AI systems can be systematically identified and addressed before deployment. Daniel Kang's cybersecurity benchmarking work quantifies the offensive capabilities of AI agents, providing policymakers and labs with empirical evidence needed to make deployment and access decisions. Collectively, these efforts aim to produce tools, benchmarks, and theoretical frameworks that make it possible to evaluate and improve the safety of AI systems in a rigorous, reproducible way.