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Brian Christian is a computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and bestselling author whose work explores the human implications of computing.

He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley and the author of three books of nonfiction.

The Alignment Problem won the Excellence in Science Communication Award from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and was called “the best book on the key technical and moral questions of AI” by The New York Times. Algorithms to Live By (coauthored with Tom Griffiths) was a #1 Audible bestseller and an MIT Technology Review best book of the year. The Most Human Human was a Wall Street Journal bestseller, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a New Yorker favorite book of the year.

As a researcher

His work spans AI alignment and computational cognitive science, and has appeared in journals from PNAS to Dædalus to Cognitive Science, and at conferences from ICLR to COLM to FAccT to NeurIPS. He completed his PhD at Oxford’s Human Information Processing Lab, supported by the Clarendon Scholarship; his thesis received a Letter of Commendation from the Medical Sciences Division and an examination prize from Lincoln College. His research has been discussed in Nature, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Wired.

As a writer

His books have been translated into twenty languages, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and The Paris Review, earning fellowships at Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and MacDowell, publication in Best American Science & Nature Writing, and an award from the Academy of American Poets.

As a developer

His open-source contributions span the Python data-science stack, the Ruby web stack, and Apple’s MLX framework, and have shipped on over 100 million Mac computers. He built websites for startups and Fortune 50 companies in the 1990s and 2000s, and from 2013–2022 he served as Director of Technology for the literary publisher McSweeney’s.

As a speaker

He has been a featured guest on The Daily Show, The Ezra Klein Show, and Radiolab, lectured at Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Yale, the Santa Fe Institute, and the London School of Economics, and advised executives, Cabinet members, parliamentarians, and policymakers in six countries and the UN.

Born in Wilmington, Delaware, he studied computer science and philosophy at Brown, poetry and nonfiction at the University of Washington, and cognitive science and machine learning at Oxford. He lives in San Francisco.