creators

Zico Kolter: CMU ML head, OpenAI safety committee chair

Zico Kolter heads Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning Department, chairs OpenAI's Safety and Security Committee and is chief scientist of Gray Swan AI.

J. Zico Kolter is Professor and head of the Machine Learning Department in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, a post he has held since July 2024. He joined the CMU faculty in 2012, and holds a BS in computer science from Georgetown University and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. His research covers AI safety, robustness and optimization. He has served on OpenAI's board of directors since August 2024, where he chairs the Safety and Security Committee, the body that oversees safety and security practices across OpenAI's work. In 2025 he joined Qualcomm's board as an independent director and sits on its governance committee. He is co-founder and chief scientist of Gray Swan AI, an AI security company, and an advisor to BNY; Schmidt Sciences funds his work on adversarial transfer under its Science of Trustworthy AI programme. Kolter co-authored "Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models", which introduced the Greedy Coordinate Gradient method for generating adversarial suffixes that get past the safety guardrails of aligned language models.

Specialization

AI safety, adversarial robustness, LLM security, optimization

Country

United States