Anca Dragan

UC Berkeley professor who has headed AI safety and alignment at Google DeepMind since 2024, responsible for Gemini’s safeguards, and who frames the work as covering present-day harms and extreme risks from advancing capabilities alike.

Roles

2015 – presentAssistant Professor, then Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC BerkeleyFounded the InterACT Lab; co-PI of the Center for Human-Compatible AI; currently on leave to Google DeepMind. Start year comes from a search snippet, not a fetched page.Source →
Feb 2024 – presentHead of AI Safety and Alignment, Google DeepMindLeads the organisation formed in February 2024 to safeguard Gemini models and align future ones; also co-leads Gemini post-training. By July 2026 she signs as "VP, AI Safety & Alignment, Google".Source →

On the record

Jul 2026 · Open letter · Pacing the Frontier
There is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.
Head of AI Safety and Alignment, Google DeepMind at the time
Signed as "VP, AI Safety & Alignment, Google"; the letter asks the US government to support international tools to deliberately pace automated AI development.
Pacing the Frontier →
2 Apr 2025 · Post · Google DeepMind blog
it is essential with any technology this powerful, that even a small possibility of harm must be taken seriously and prevented.
Head of AI Safety and Alignment, Google DeepMind at the time
Lead author with Rohin Shah, Four Flynn and Shane Legg; accompanies the 30-author paper "An Approach to Technical AGI Safety and Security".
Taking a responsible path to AGI →
28 Mar 2024 · Statement · UC Berkeley EECS
Google DeepMind is fairly unique in that capability and safety go hand-in-hand and have to advance together.
Head of AI Safety and Alignment, Google DeepMind at the time
Departmental announcement of her move; she adds that industry and academia "absolutely need" to work together to get safety done.
Anca Dragan named Head of AI Safety and Alignment at Google DeepMind →
30 May 2023 · Statement · Center for AI Safety
Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley at the time
Listed as "Associate Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley".
Statement on AI Risk →