James Payor
Bio
James Payor is an independent AI alignment researcher based in Australia. He worked as Research Staff at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Berkeley from January 2018 to April 2022, and has since been pursuing independent AI alignment research. Before MIRI, he was co-founder and CTO of Draftable, a document comparison software company based in Melbourne, from 2015 to 2017. His research focuses on agent foundations, proof-based cooperation, corrigibility, and building AI systems that maintain robust alignment with human input. He is notable for developing a method for proof-based cooperation that does not require Löb's theorem, and has published work on modal fixpoint cooperation on the AI Alignment Forum. More recently he has been working on better foundations for theorem proving, computer-assisted mathematics, and dependently-typed programming languages. In his youth he represented Australia at the 2013 International Olympiad in Informatics, earning a silver medal.
Links
- Personal Website
- https://payor.io/
- Twitter / X
- LessWrong
- jamespayor
Grants
from Survival and Flourishing Fund
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Details
- Last Updated
- Mar 22, 2026, 4:41 PM UTC
- Created
- Mar 19, 2026, 6:22 PM UTC