University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania, founded in 1740 and chartered in 1755, is one of the oldest universities in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, it enrolls approximately 25,000 students across four undergraduate schools and twelve graduate and professional schools. Penn's AI safety-relevant research is distributed across several centers. The PRECISE Center for Safe AI, based in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, focuses on making AI systems safer through formal verification, robustness against adversarial attacks, neural network controller verification, and real-time anomaly detection. The center targets mission-critical domains including healthcare, autonomous vehicles, and critical infrastructure where standard reliability levels are insufficient. The Wharton Accountable AI Lab (WAAL), led by Professor Kevin Werbach, is a research hub dedicated to AI governance, regulation, and ethics. Its three core focus areas are AI governance frameworks and compliance mechanisms, AI regulation including legislation and judicial decisions worldwide, and AI ethics covering moral implications and societal impacts. Perry World House, Penn's global policy think tank, has produced significant research on AGI and international security, including a jointly commissioned report with the RAND Geopolitics of AGI Initiative examining the strategic implications of the US-China AGI race, nuclear deterrence in an AGI context, and novel governance models for advanced AI development. The broader Penn AI initiative coordinates AI research and education across the university, with focus areas including AI foundations, AI and health, AI and science, AI and business, and AI and society. Penn also hosts the Wharton AI and Analytics Initiative, which has funded over 147 research projects totaling more than $2.3 million, including projects on compositional AI safety, calibrated and trustworthy AI models, and bias and fairness in machine learning.