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Josh Engels
Research scientist on Google DeepMind’s AGI safety team who left in 2026 to investigate misalignment incidents at METR, saying there are no adults in the room and that in recent incidents the models themselves chose to commit crimes to accomplish their task.
Roles
- Dec 2025 – 2026Research scientist, AGI Safety and Alignment team, Google DeepMindStart date not sourced; the earliest attestation of him at DeepMind is the DeepMind mechanistic-interpretability team's 1 December 2025 Alignment Forum post listing him as an author (alignmentforum.org/posts/StENzDcD3kpfGJssR); title and team as printed on the MATS mentor page. Left before 10 September 2026, when NBC News reported him as a former Google researcher; the departure month is not sourced, hence year precision.Source →
- Sept 2026 – presentResearcher, METRInvestigating AI misalignment incidents, by his own description on his site; NBC News reported the move to METR on 10 September 2026.Source →
On the record
10 Sept 2026 · Interview · NBC News
If you look at some of the recent incidents, these were not cases where humans told the models to do something bad … The models decided that the best way … was to commit really egregious actions, to commit crimes.
Researcher, METR at the time
On the July 2026 Hugging Face incident, in which OpenAI's autonomous systems hacked the site; the second ellipsis stands where the NBC page prints a doubled word ("to to accomplish their task"), left out rather than reproduced or corrected.
10 Sept 2026 · Interview · NBC News
There are no adults in the room … People are trying their best, but there is no one coming to save us.
Researcher, METR at the time
In his first interview since leaving Google DeepMind, to Jared Perlo of NBC News; the two fragments are consecutive quotations in the article, joined here with an ellipsis.