Cornell University

Cornell University is a private Ivy League research university founded on April 27, 1865, by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White in Ithaca, New York. With approximately 2,100 faculty and over 12,000 employees, it is one of the world's leading research institutions. In the context of AI safety and existential risk reduction, Cornell hosts several notable researchers and programs. Angelina Wang, an Assistant Professor at Cornell Tech and the Department of Information Science, leads the Responsible AI Lab. Her research challenges oversimplified approaches to AI fairness, develops better evaluation methods for generative AI systems, and examines the broader societal impacts of AI as an epistemic technology. Wang joined Cornell in 2025 after a postdoc at Stanford HAI and a PhD from Princeton. Her lab received a $170,000 grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund in the 2025 S-Process Fairness Track, funded by Jaan Tallinn. Lionel Levine, a Professor of Mathematics, transitioned into AI safety research with support from Open Philanthropy, which provided a $342,645 grant. His work applies mathematical rigor to AI alignment, including value alignment measurement (EigenBench, accepted as an oral presentation at ICLR 2026), dispositional AI safety, and mathematical reasoning benchmarks like FrontierMath. Levine serves as faculty advisor for both Cornell AI Alignment (CAIA) and the Cornell Math+AI Lab, and teaches a graduate course on Mathematics for AI Safety. Bart Selman, a Professor of Computer Science, co-founded the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI) in 2016 and serves as a principal investigator. His research focuses on computational aspects of AI safety and ethics. Joseph Halpern, the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Computer Science, is also a CHAI faculty member whose work on reasoning about knowledge, uncertainty, causality, and game theory has been supported by Open Philanthropy and the Cooperative AI Foundation. Cornell also joined the U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC) in 2024, contributing expertise in testing AI safety, evaluating AI fairness, and analyzing AI transparency compliance. The Cornell AI Alignment student group (CAIA) runs technical reading groups, supports original research, and has contributed to policy work including advocacy for New York's RAISE Act. Cornell Effective Altruism runs programs focused on AI safety and global catastrophic risk.