Hello! I’m Saffron. I’m a technologist, researcher and writer.
I’m a research scientist on the Societal Impacts team at Anthropic. We tackle big questions about how AI will change society, and use these insights to guide responsible AI development.
I previously co-founded the Collective Intelligence Project (CIP), which works to make AI development more democratic and use AI to strengthen democracy. For this work, my co-founder and I were named in the 2024 TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI list, and our work was featured twice in the New York Times. As an advisor there now, I continue to support their work on improving how society makes decisions about transformative technologies.
Before that, I was a research engineer at DeepMind, working on a hodgepodge of things including: language models, human-AI interaction, conceptual reasoning, value alignment, and multi-agent RL.
My bylines have appeared in WIRED, The New Statesman, Reboot and elsewhere. You can also find my thoughts at Substack and Twitter.
More stuff about me: I co-founded Kernel Magazine. I have a degree in Applied Mathematics-Computer Science, with minors in Government and German, from Harvard. I'm from New Zealand. And sometimes I do photography.
Selected Research
- Values in the Wild: Discovering and Analyzing Values in Real-World Language Model Interactions - S Huang, E Durmus, ..., D Ganguli (2025). I'm interviewed for this in a VentureBeat article. Also, we released the dataset and taxonomy of thousands of AI values here.
- Collective Constitutional AI - S Huang*, D Siddarth*, L Lovitt*, ..., D Ganguli* (*joint co-authors) (2024). Featured in the New York Times. Blog post.
- Beyond Static AI Evaluations: Advancing Human Interaction Evaluations for LLM Harms and Risks - L Ibrahim, S Huang, ... (2024).
- Using the Veil of Ignorance to align AI systems with principles of justice - L Weidinger, K McKee, ... (PNAS 2023).
- Generative AI and the Digital Commons - S Huang, D Siddarth (2022).
- Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models - E Perez, S Huang, ... (EMNLP 2022).
- Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher - JW Rae, S Borgeaud, ... (2021).
See more research → (or view on Google Scholar)
Selected Writing
- The Surprising Synergy Between Acupuncture and AI - WIRED.
- Here's How To Share AI's Future Wealth - NOEMA.
- Collective Intelligence over Artificial Intelligence - S Huang, D Siddarth. AI Morality. Oxford University Press (2024).
- ChatGPT and the death of the author - The New Statesman.
- Control and Consciousness of Time - Summer of Protocols.
- Privacy and pluralism - what is privacy, and why does it matter?
- Turing-Complete Governance - on the power and potential of EVM arbitrariness for collective decision-making.
- Letters to a Young Technologist - a collection of essays written with some dear friends. I penned What is Technology? and To Be a Technologist is to be Human.
- Harvard Creates Managers Instead of Elites in Palladium Magazine - I also did a podcast episode on this.
Media
- TIME: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2024 - Saffron Huang and Divya Siddarth (TIME, Sep 2024)
- The Race to Democratise AI (Democracy Technologies, October 2023)
- Rewiring Democracy: can society control its tech destiny? (Culture3, August 2023)
- Aligning Technology Development with Public Input: A Conversation with Saffron Huang (C/Change, August 2023)
- Can AI And Democracy Fix Each Other? (The New York Times, April 2023)
- Alumni Profile: Saffron Huang, A.B. '20 (Harvard SEAS, April 2023)
Talks / Podcasts
- UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF 2023): Digital Democracy in the Age of AI (Oct 2023)
- OpenAI Forum: The Importance of Public Input in Designing AI Systems (inaugural event) - (July 2023)
- Panel at Civic Future's The Great Stagnation conference (July 2023)
- Demos: Collective Intelligence Panel (July 2023)
- The Rhys Show podcast (April 2023)
- Generative AI and Democracy at Bruce Schneier's International Workshop on Recreating Democracy (December 2022)
- Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models at EMNLP and IJCAI (2022)
- Palladium Magazine podcast (July 2020)
Extended Publication List
- S Huang, E Durmus, ..., D Ganguli (arXiv 2025). I'm interviewed for this in a VentureBeat article.
- Clio: Privacy-Preserving Insights into Real-World AI Use - Anthropic Societal Impacts Team (arXiv 2024). Introduces a system for analyzing AI assistant usage patterns across millions of conversations while preserving user privacy.
- How large language models can reshape collective intelligence - Nature Human Behaviour (2024).
- Evaluating feature steering: A case study in mitigating social biases - Anthropic Societal Impacts Team (arXiv 2024).
- How will advanced AI systems impact democracy? - arXiv (2024).
- Collective Constitutional AI - S Huang*, D Siddarth*, L Lovitt*, ..., D Ganguli* (*joint co-authors) (2024). Featured in the New York Times. Blog post.
- Beyond Static AI Evaluations: Advancing Human Interaction Evaluations for LLM Harms and Risks - L Ibrahim, S Huang, ...
- Using the Veil of Ignorance to align AI systems with principles of justice - L Weidinger, K McKee, ... (PNAS 2023)
- Generative AI and the Digital Commons - S Huang, D Siddarth (2022)
- Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models - E Perez, S Huang, ... (EMNLP 2022)
- Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher - JW Rae, S Borgeaud, ... (2021)
- Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens - S Borgeaud, A Mensch, ... (ICML 2022)
- Bi-Level Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Intervening in Intertemporal Social Dilemmas - S Huang (2020)
Extended Writing Archive
- Here's How To Share AI's Future Wealth - NOEMA.
- Collective Intelligence over Artificial Intelligence - S Huang, D Siddarth. AI Morality. Oxford University Press.
- A Vision of Democratic AI - D Siddarth, S Huang, A Tang. The Digitalist Papers (site). Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
- Predistribution over Redistribution: Beyond the Windfall Clause - CIP Blog (with Sam Manning).
- The Surprising Synergy Between Acupuncture and AI - WIRED.
- ChatGPT and the death of the author - The New Statesman.
- Control and Consciousness of Time - Summer of Protocols.
- A philosophy of subtraction - Reboot.
- Who will control crypto? - on consistent patterns of centralisation in past information technologies and implications for open blockchains.
- Privacy and pluralism - what is privacy, and why does it matter?
- Turing-Complete Governance - on the power and potential of EVM arbitrariness for collective decision-making.
- Letters to a Young Technologist - a collection of essays written with some dear friends. I penned What is Technology? and To Be a Technologist is to be Human.
- Harvard Creates Managers Instead of Elites in Palladium Magazine - I also did a podcast episode on this.
- Virtually Social in The Wave Arts Magazine.