Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) was founded in 1918 and officially opened on April 1, 1925, on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. It is one of Israel's most prominent research universities, enrolling approximately 23,000 students from 90 countries across faculties including humanities, law, social sciences, natural sciences, medicine, and computer science. Within the context of AI safety and governance, the most significant unit is the Governance of AI Lab (GOAL), housed jointly in the Faculty of Law and the School of Computer Science and Engineering. GOAL is led by Dr. Noam Kolt, an Assistant Professor who completed his doctorate at the University of Toronto, served as a research advisor to Google DeepMind, and was a member of OpenAI's GPT-4 red team. He also holds affiliate positions at the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics and Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. GOAL's research focuses on two primary areas: the governance of AI agents — examining how existing and new legal and regulatory frameworks can manage increasingly autonomous AI systems — and legal alignment, an interdisciplinary field that investigates how legal rules, interpretive methods, and institutional design can be used to make AI systems more reliably safe, ethical, and compliant. Notable outputs include Kolt's paper 'Governing AI Agents' (Notre Dame Law Review, forthcoming), the paper 'Regulating Advanced Artificial Agents' (Science, 2024), and a major collaborative preprint on 'Legal Alignment for Safe and Ethical AI' (January 2026, with co-authors from Oxford, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and other institutions). Kolt also co-led the development of the AI Agent Index, the first public database cataloging AI agents by their technical, safety, and policy-relevant features. In August 2025, Open Philanthropy awarded the Hebrew University of Jerusalem $2,725,000 to support GOAL's research on AI governance and legal alignment, under Open Philanthropy's focus area of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. Separately, Professor Guy Katz in the School of Computer Science and Engineering leads the university's contribution to RobustifAI, a €9.3 million Horizon Europe consortium launched in June 2025, which focuses on advancing the robustness and trustworthiness of generative AI through formal verification methods. HUJI also has broader AI research strength through its Center of Knowledge in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (MLAI).