Cornell AI Alignment

AI will change the world as we know it.

We’re a community of students and faculty at Cornell working toward reducing risks and improving the trajectory of AI development.

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Our mission

We believe that AI could bring immense benefits to the world, provided that it’s developed safely and governed responsibly.

We bring together technical AI safety, policy, governance, and broader conversations about AI to ensure that increasingly capable AI systems remain aligned with human intentions and benefit all of humanity.

Why it matters

AI Safety

01

Technical alignment

First, it may be tricky to build safe, reliable, and steerable systems when those systems are starting to become as intelligent and as aware of their surroundings as their designers. To use an analogy, it is easy for a chess grandmaster to detect bad moves in a novice but very hard for a novice to detect bad moves in a grandmaster. If we build an AI system that’s significantly more competent than human experts but it pursues goals that conflict with our best interests, the consequences could be dire. This is the technical alignment problem.

02

Policy, governance, and societal impacts

Second, rapid AI progress would be very disruptive, changing employment, macroeconomics, and power structures both within and between nations. These disruptions could be catastrophic in their own right, and they could also make it more difficult to build AI systems in careful, thoughtful ways, leading to further chaos and even more problems with AI.

Source: Core views on AI safety: When, why, what, and how (Anthropic, 2023)

Upcoming Events

We host talks, reading groups, workshops, and socials throughout the semester, and anyone is welcome to come.

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Past events

News

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Attendees chatting over refreshments at the CAIA open house and mocktail mixer

Event ·

CAIA open house & mocktail mixer

We welcomed new and returning members for mocktails and conversation at our open house. Thank you to everyone who came to meet the community and learn about getting involved in AI safety at Cornell.

Prof. Paul Gölz presenting to CAIA attendees in a Cornell classroom

Event ·

Guest talk with Prof. Paul Gölz

Prof. Paul Gölz joined CAIA to present Distortion of AI Alignment: Does Preference Optimization Optimize for Preferences? The talk explored how preference optimization can distort diverse human preferences and what this means for pluralistic AI alignment. Thank you to Prof. Gölz and everyone who joined the discussion.

Research ·

CAIA papers accepted to ICML 2026 workshops

CAIA members contributed to multiple papers accepted to ICML 2026 workshops, spanning pluralistic alignment, trustworthy AI, and mechanistic interpretability.

Announcement ·

New York signs the RAISE Act into law

Governor Kathy Hochul signed the RAISE Act into law, establishing nation-leading AI safety requirements for frontier model developers. CAIA helped canvass support for the bill.

Event ·

CAIA ice skate social

Thank you everyone for a great semester working on AI safety. We wrapped up with a fun CAIA ice skate social.

Recent Work

A few recent papers that CAIA members have worked on.

All research

Our members have worked with

  • Anthropic logo
  • Google DeepMind logo
  • MATS logo
  • Pivotal logo
  • METR logo
  • Apollo Research logo
  • SaferAI logo
  • Center for AI Safety logo
  • LISA logo
  • CBAI logo
  • Berkeley SPAR logo
  • KAIROS logo
  • Amazon AGI logo
  • RAND logo
  • SAIF logo
  • Gray Swan logo
CAIA members in a discussion around a seminar table

Join us

Open to Everyone

All of our events are open to everyone. If you join our Slack, you’re considered a member. It’s where we share conversations, announcements, and opportunities.

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