I'm an AI & technology
expert safety researcher conditional optimist policy expert
working to make technology work for everyone.

Irene Solaiman is an AI safety and policy expert. She is Head of Global Policy at Hugging Face, where she is conducting social impact research and leading public policy. Irene serves on the Partnership on AI's Policy Steering Committee and the Center for Democracy and Technology's AI Governance Lab Advisory Committee. Irene advises responsible AI initiatives at OECD and IEEE. Her research includes AI value alignment, responsible releases, and combating misuse and malicious use. Irene was recently named and was named MIT Tech Review's 35 Innovators Under 35 2023 for her research.


Irene formerly initiated and led bias and social impact research at OpenAI, where she also led public policy. Her research on adapting GPT-3 behavior received a spotlight at NeurIPS 2021. She was recently also Tech Ethics and Policy Mentor at Stanford University and an International Strategy Forum Fellow at Schmidt Futures. She formerly built AI policy at Zillow Group and advised policymakers on responsible autonomous decision-making and privacy as a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center.


Outside of work, Irene enjoys her ukulele, making bad puns, and mentoring underrepresented people in tech. Irene holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Maryland and a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Catch Me In...

MIT Tech Review 35 Innovators Under 35: Artificial Intelligence – 2023

TechCrunch's Women in AI Making A Difference Profile of Irene Solaiman - 2024

100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ – 2023

AI Developers to Watch 2023

My Latest Research and Publications

Solaiman and Talat et al, Evaluating the Social Impact of Generative AI Systems in Systems and Society, preprint, 2023.

Solaiman, The Gradient of Generative AI Release: Methods and Considerations, FAccT, 2023.

Solaiman, Generative AI Systems Aren't Just Open or Closed, Wired Ideas, 2023.

Solaiman and Dennison, Process for Adapting Language Models to Society (PALMS) with Values-Targeted Datasets, NeurIPS (spotlight), 2021.

Solaiman et al, Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models, OpenAI, 2019.

Selected Podcasts + Panels

The Gradient Podcast, Irene Solaiman: AI Policy and Social Impact, April 2023.

NPR's Know It All: 1A and WIRED's Guide to A.I., What Is AI And How Will It Shape The Future?, February 2023.

Tech Policy Press Responsible Release and Accountability for Generative AI Systems, May 2023.

NPR Morning Edition, AI-generated deepfakes are moving fast. Policymakers can't keep up, April 2023.

Mozilla Panel, The EU’s struggle with general-purpose AI, December 2022.

Microsoft Data Science & Law Forum 4.0: Governing AI, Deploying Large Language Models Safely and Lawfully, May 2022.

All Tech is Human Panel, Algorithmic Transparency in Digital Spaces, May 2022.

Center for Data Innovation, Should the EU Regulate General-Purpose AI Systems?, September 2022.

My Musings in The News

AI Roundtable, Barron's: AI Is the Real Deal—if You Understand It. Our 5 Roundtable Pros Are Here to Help, August 2023.

AI Detection, EuroNews: Video on ChatGPT: Is it possible to detect AI-generated text? , January 2023.

AI Detection and Watermarks, MIT Tech Review: Melissa Heikkilä on A watermark for chatbots can expose text written by an AI, January 2023.

AI Generated Scientific Papers, Nature: Holly Else on Abstracts written by ChatGPT fool scientists, January 2023.

AI Detection Methods, Wall Street Journal: Ann-Marie Alcántara on Is It Human or AI? New Tools Help You Spot the Bots, January 2023.

AI Detection, Consent, and Norms, Libération: Florian Gouthière on ChatGPT : comment détecter qu’un texte a été écrit par l’intelligence artificielle ?, January 2023.

My Research in The News

Release Gradient and Chatbots, Wired: Khari Johnson on Chatbots Got Big—and Their Ethical Red Flags Got Bigger, February 2023.

PALMS and the Problems of Fairness, Vox: Sigal Samuel on Why it’s so damn hard to make AI fair and unbiased, April 2022.

PALMS in NLP, New York Times: Steven Johnson on A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?, April 2022.

AI Detection for Language Models, MIT Tech Review: Melissa Heikkilä on How to spot AI-generated text, December 2022.

Policy Thoughts in The News

EU AI Act and General Purpose Systems, Venture Beat: Taryn Plumb on AI Act: What does general purpose AI (GPAI) even mean?, September 2022.