creators

Connor Leahy: ControlAI and EleutherAI founder

Connor Leahy is US Executive Director of ControlAI. He co-founded EleutherAI in 2020 and led the AI safety company Conjecture from 2022 until he left in 2026.

Connor Leahy is an AI researcher and campaigner who works on the risks of advanced AI. As a student in 2019 he reverse-engineered and replicated GPT-2 after OpenAI initially withheld the full model. In July 2020 he co-founded EleutherAI with Sid Black and Leo Gao, an open research collective that grew out of a Discord server about GPT-3 and went on to release The Pile, GPT-J, GPT-NeoX and the Pythia model suite. Conjecture, the AI safety company he led as chief executive, began on 1 March 2022, the day he and Black moved to the UK. In a retrospective published on 26 March 2026 he wrote that the chapter was closing, that research on frontier language models had become too expensive to sustain, and that he was joining ControlAI to run its US arm and moving to Washington DC. ControlAI is a nonprofit campaigning for policy to prevent extinction-level risk from superintelligent AI; it is registered as a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee in the UK and as a 501(c)(4) in the United States, and is also active in Canada and Germany. Its own site lists Leahy as US Executive Director.

Specialization

AI safety, AI policy, open-source language models

Country

United States