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Richard Ngo: independent AI safety researcher

Richard Ngo is an independent AI researcher and philosopher, formerly of OpenAI governance and DeepMind, who wrote AGI Safety from First Principles.

Richard Ngo is an independent AI researcher and philosopher. He grew up in Vietnam and New Zealand, read computer science and philosophy at Oxford, took a master's in machine learning at Cambridge, then began a Cambridge PhD on the philosophy of machine learning and dropped it in 2021. He worked as a research engineer on the AGI safety team at DeepMind before joining OpenAI's Governance team in 2021, where he spent three years on the capabilities and risks of advanced AI systems. He resigned on 13 November 2024, writing that he had 'a lot of unanswered questions about the events of the last twelve months, which made it harder for me to trust that my work here would benefit the world long-term.' Ngo wrote 'AGI Safety from First Principles', a 2020 sequence setting out a case for AI existential risk, and co-authored 'The Alignment Problem from a Deep Learning Perspective'. He now writes the blog Mind the Future and mentors for the MATS programme on agent foundations and multi-agent intelligence. Encour Press published his first fiction collection, 'The Gentle Romance: Stories of AI and Humanity', twenty-two stories, on 7 December 2025.

Specialization

AI safety, AI governance, agent foundations, philosophy of machine learning

Country

United States