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Peter Cihon
Public Policy and AI Governance Expert
Peter Cihon
Peter Cihon is a Senior Policy Manager at GitHub, where he works on emerging technology policy with a focus on supporting developer communities globally.123 He is based in San Francisco, California.15
Experience
Cihon has held various policy roles prior to joining GitHub, including:
- Policy Consultant at OECD.AI (Jun 2020 - Sep 2020)1
- Policy Researcher at Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (Jan 2020 - Sep 2020) and Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI) (Oct 2018 - Jan 2020)1
- Policy Consultant at the European Commission (Mar 2018 - Jun 2018)1
- Public Policy at Mozilla (Jun 2017 - Sep 2017)1
- Google Policy Fellow at LIRNEasia (Mar 2016 - Mar 2017)1
Education
Cihon holds degrees from:
- University of Oxford (Social Science of the Internet & Public Policy)1
- Williams College (Bachelor of Arts in Sociology & Political Economy)1
- University of Cambridge (Master of Philosophy in Technology Policy)1
Honors & Awards
Cihon has received several honors and awards, including:
- Phi Beta Kappa Society (elected after junior year at Williams College in September 2015)1
- Herchel Smith Fellowship from Williams College (December 2015) to study at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge1
- NextGen@ICANN58 Fellow from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in December 20161
Thought Leadership
Cihon frequently shares his expertise on technology policy issues. He recently spoke at TrustCon 2024 on "Trust & Safety in Gen AI: Balancing Freedom and Safety".23 He has also written about supporting open source and open science on LinkedIn.4
Highlights
Last week I was fortunate to attend Center for Human-Compatible AI's annual workshop in Asilomar. It was an invaluable program for a policy person to learn the current state of the art in AI safety, with accessible talks on the latest in interpretability, evaluations, robustness, deployment safeguards, and more. Additional sessions on governance and societal impacts, with some co-hosted with the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence(BAAI) live across the Pacific.
Huge thanks to the organizers at CHAI! Great to connect with many colleagues including Gillian K. Hadfield Allan Dafoe Ondrej Bajgar Risto Uuk David Evan Harris Lama Saouma https://lnkd.in/gwtf54yX
Earlier this week I had the opportunity to attend Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)'s 5 year commemoration. It was a great program, covering national security, education, open source and more. Best of all was a panel honoring the Godmothers of AI and their pioneering careers Fei-Fei Li, Barbara Grosz, Corinna Cortes, Daphne Koller and Ruzena Bajcsy.
It offered a time to reflect. At HAI's 2019 Policy Conference, I had the chance to present a work-in-progress on institutional design for the international governance of advanced AI, a paper with Matthijs M. Maas and Luke Kemp that we later published in Global Policy. We asked whether governance should be centralized or decentralized, offering considerations on both sides. In the past year, it has been encouraging to see the emergence of a networked approach to governance with the AI Safety Institutes, essentially retaining the option of moving towards centralization or decentralization over time. Perhaps then our monitoring framework and considerations remain useful https://lnkd.in/g4t-8Nn
Thanks for the invitation and for all of your work Daniel Zhang Russell Wald and team. Here's to the next 5 years of Human-Centered AI!
