Max Kaufmann

Toronto, Canada

Bio

Updated 03/22/26

Max Kaufmann is a PhD student at the University of Toronto supervised by Roger Grosse, and a Visiting Student Researcher at Google DeepMind where he works on chain-of-thought monitoring for AI safety. He completed his undergraduate degree in computer science at the University of Cambridge. Before his PhD, he was part of the founding team at the UK AI Safety Institute, where he helped scale the organisation and established their LLM agents team. He has also worked as a research intern at UC Berkeley's Human-Compatible AI group, collaborating with Owain Evans on LLM generalization research, including co-authoring papers on the Reversal Curse and situational awareness in LLMs. His research spans adversarial robustness, LLM generalization, LLM evaluation, training data attribution, and chain-of-thought monitoring. He has received funding from the Long-Term Future Fund to support his early-career alignment research.