Vanessa Kosoy

Israel

Bio

Updated 03/23/26

Vanessa Kosoy is an AI alignment researcher based in Israel, currently serving as Director of AI Research at ALTER (Association for Long Term Existence and Resilience) and Research Lead at CORAL (Computational Rational Agents Laboratory), while pursuing a PhD in Mathematics at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology under Shay Moran. She holds a BSc in Pure Mathematics from Tel Aviv University and an MSc in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and spent over 15 years in software engineering roles including algorithm engineer, R&D manager, and startup founder before transitioning to AI safety research full-time roughly a decade ago. She was previously a research associate at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and has been funded by the Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF). Her research centers on the learning-theoretic AI alignment agenda, and she is best known for developing Infra-Bayesianism (with co-author Alex Appel), a mathematical framework for handling non-realizability in reinforcement learning, as well as Infra-Bayesian Physicalism (now called Formal Computational Realism), which addresses naturalized induction. She has been a mentor in the MATS (ML Alignment Theory Scholars) program, running a track focused on the learning-theoretic agenda, and is a prolific contributor to the AI Alignment Forum and LessWrong.