About Us

The AI Objectives Institute (AOI) is a non-profit research lab working to ensure that both AI and future economic systems are built and deployed with genuine human objectives at their core, enabled by broad public input and scalable cooperation.

Founded by the late internet security pioneer Dr. Peter Eckersley, the organization collaborates with and employs working groups of academics, scientists, economists, entrepreneurs, and government and civil society advisors. We collaboratively explore solutions to keep human objectives central to how AI impacts society — at the level of individuals, collectives, and societal systems.

Peter Eckersley
Founder & Chief Scientist (197* - 2022)

Peter Eckersley’s research, policy, and leadership work focuses on AI ethics, safety, cybersecurity, privacy and other topics. In addition to co-founding the AI Objectives Institute, he has been a Visiting Senior Fellow at OpenAI. Previously, Peter spent many years as Chief Computer Scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and served as the first Director of Research at the Partnership on AI. He has worked on setting sound policies around high-stakes machine learning applications such as recidivism prediction, self-driving vehicles, cybersecurity, and military uses of AI, and on many other privacy, cybersecurity and technical AI safety projects.

What kind of work does AOI do?

Our projects include theoretical and strategic research, and applications of that research in the form of experiments with current AI capabilities. We focus on applications not on the default path of for-profit ventures — including proof-of-concept prototypes and open-source tools — with the goal of demonstrating how current and future technology can be deployed for socially beneficial outcomes and long-term resilience.

Our work falls into three broad categories:

Alignment of markets, AI, and other optimizers
Scaling cooperation with AI assistance
Human attention and epistemic security

Funded By

Individual donors

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