Ajeya Cotra

Senior Program Officer, Potential Risks from Advanced AI

Ajeya leads Open Phil’s grantmaking on technical research that could help to clarify and reduce catastrophic risks from advanced AI. As part of this role, Ajeya conducts analysis on threat models (ways that advanced AI could cause catastrophic harm) and technical agendas (technical work that may help to address these threat models). Previously, she worked on estimating when transformative AI might be developed, estimating the expected returns to funding across cause areas related to global catastrophic risk, and thinking about how worldview diversification could be implemented in budget allocation. She joined Open Philanthropy in July 2016 as a Research Analyst.

Ajeya has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where she founded the Effective Altruists of Berkeley student group and taught a course on effective altruism.