Allan Dafoe
Allan Dafoe
Biographical profile of Allan Dafoe covering his role as VP of AI Policy at Google DeepMind and his founding of the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI) at Oxford. Documents his early formalization of AI governance as a research field, his work on the cooperative AI research agenda, and his influence on Western AI-policy discourse including the 2019 "AI Governance — A Research Agenda" framing paper.
Quick Assessment
| Dimension | Assessment |
|---|---|
| Primary Role | VP of AI Policy, Google DeepMind (2024–present) |
| Prior Role | Founding Director, Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI) at Oxford (2017–2024); Associate Professor of International Politics, University of Oxford |
| Key Contributions | Helped establish AI governance as an academic field; lead author of "AI Governance: A Research Agenda" (GovAI, 2018); co-leads the Cooperative AI Foundation; influential in shaping Anglo-American AI-policy discourse on compute governance and racing dynamics |
| Education | PhD in Political Science, UC Berkeley (2012); BA, Stanford |
| Research Themes | International political economy of AI; compute governance; cooperative AI; arms-race dynamics; structural risks from advanced AI |
Overview
Allan Dafoe is a political scientist who has played a central role in establishing AI governance as a recognized field of academic research and in connecting that research to Western government policy. He founded the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI) in 2017, initially as a research program inside the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, and led it until joining Google DeepMind as Head of Long-term Strategy and Governance in 2021. He was promoted to VP of AI Policy in 2024.
His 2018 paper "AI Governance: A Research Agenda" — published as a GovAI white paper — is widely cited as one of the first systematic articulations of what AI governance research should aim to do, and has functioned as a curriculum-shaping document for the field.
Background
Education and Early Career
Dafoe earned a BA from Stanford and a PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley in 2012. His doctoral work focused on international relations and the political economy of technology, with thesis research on how technological change shapes international power dynamics. He held positions at Yale University (Assistant Professor of Political Science, 2013–2017) before moving to Oxford in 2017 as Associate Professor of International Politics.
Move to AI Governance
At Oxford, Dafoe joined the Future of Humanity Institute and founded its AI governance research program — initially small and focused on producing rigorous academic work bridging political science and AI safety. Under Dafoe's leadership, the program grew into the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI), which formally separated from FHI in 2021 to become an independent research center.
Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI)
GovAI under Dafoe was instrumental in:
- Building the field: Training a generation of AI governance researchers through the GovAI Fellowship and Summer Fellowship programs, many of whom subsequently took policy roles at major AI labs, the UK AI Safety Institute, and government agencies
- Framework papers: Publishing the "AI Governance: A Research Agenda" white paper (Dafoe 2018), which articulated AI governance as the study of "norms and institutions that influence how AI is built and deployed"
- Compute governance: Hosting research that later informed the export controls and compute-monitoring proposals adopted by Western governments in 2022–2024
- Cooperative AI: Co-organizing the Cooperative AI Foundation and the "Open Problems in Cooperative AI" research agenda (Dafoe, Hughes, Bachrach, et al., 2020), framing how AI systems should be designed to participate in cooperative interactions with humans and each other
After Dafoe's departure to DeepMind, GovAI has continued under successive directors, most recently Markus Anderljung.
DeepMind Role
Dafoe joined Google DeepMind in 2021 as Head of Long-term Strategy and Governance and was promoted to VP of AI Policy in 2024 as part of the post-merger consolidation of policy functions across Google DeepMind and Google.
His DeepMind portfolio reportedly includes:
- DeepMind's contributions to the Frontier Safety Framework (launched May 2024) and its evolution
- DeepMind's engagement with the UK AI Safety Institute, the US AI Safety Institute, and the EU AI Office on frontier-model evaluations
- Policy research on compute governance, international coordination, and the AI race
- Internal advocacy for safety-driven trade-offs in DeepMind's product release decisions
Critics inside the AI safety community have raised concerns about whether a researcher embedded inside a frontier lab can credibly advocate for governance positions that constrain that lab's commercial trajectory. Dafoe's defenders have argued that the policy positions adopted by Google DeepMind under his tenure — including support for mandatory frontier-model evaluations and the Frontier Safety Framework — represent meaningful internal influence.
Research Contributions
"AI Governance: A Research Agenda" (2018)
The 2018 GovAI white paper articulated AI governance as a research field, distinguishing it from AI ethics (questions of what AI should do) and AI safety (questions of how to make AI do the right thing) by focusing on the institutional and political-economic structures that shape AI development. The paper proposed three research clusters: technical landscape, AI politics, and AI ideal governance.
Cooperative AI Agenda
In a 2020 Nature essay and a longer working paper, Dafoe and co-authors (Edward Hughes, Yoram Bachrach, Tantum Collins, Kevin McKee, Joel Z. Leibo, Kate Larson, and Thore Graepel) proposed cooperative AI as a distinct research program focused on AI systems' capacity to participate in cooperative interactions. The agenda has shaped subsequent work at DeepMind and elsewhere on multi-agent training, social learning, and cooperative game theory.
Structural Risks from Advanced AI
Dafoe has been an articulator of the "structural risks" framing — the view that the most concerning risks from advanced AI are not from singular rogue systems but from how AI shifts the underlying political-economic structures that constrain bad outcomes. This framing has been influential in policy circles in framing AI risk as a coordination problem rather than purely a technical alignment problem.
Public Profile
Dafoe is a regular contributor to AI policy discourse through academic papers, GovAI publications, occasional op-eds, and policy advisory roles. He has testified to UK Parliament on AI governance and contributed to multiple government and international reports on AI policy.
He is generally regarded as a credible voice across the AI policy spectrum — taken seriously by both AI safety advocates and mainstream international relations scholars — though his current position inside DeepMind has introduced some conflict-of-interest concerns about his independence.