Researcher · Academic

Scott Aaronson

Full Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin

🇺🇸 AmericanBorn 1981

At a glance

Foundational work on quantum computing, including co-developing boson sampling, a light-based test of quantum computing’s advantages. Aaronson later brought his theoretical expertise to AI safety at OpenAI, where he proposed watermarking AI-generated text to help identify its origin.

Announcing his move to OpenAI in June 2022, Aaronson asked how to “get an AI to do what we want and not do what we don’t want.” His focus was the mathematical foundations of AI safety.^[1]

In September 2026’s “The Age of Wonders and Terrors,” he wrote that “the Singularity has already started.” He argued that AI’s rapid progress made human control an urgent challenge, and called on researchers to work on AI alignment.^[2]