Nicholas Carlini

Career

1. 
   Anthropic

   • Research Scientist, safety and securityMar 2025 – present
2. 
   Google DeepMind

   • research scientist2023–2025
3. 
   Google Brain

   • research scientist2018–2023

Education

• B.A., computer science and mathematics, UC Berkeley, 2013
• Ph.D., Computer Science, UC Berkeley, 2018

Lesser-known facts

• Built a working CPU inside Conway's Game of Life.
• Spent seven years at Google Brain and DeepMind before joining in 2025.
• Left Google DeepMind in March 2025 over disagreements about openly publishing security and privacy research, joining Anthropic "for a year."
• Weighed founding a security nonprofit or taking a faculty job, and spent over 20 hours talking to Anthropic staff before deciding.
• Used Claude Code to find remotely exploitable Linux kernel vulnerabilities, including one hidden for about 23 years.
• Co-authored a poisoning attack that bought expired domains behind LAION-400M links, controlling about 0.01% of popular datasets.
• Showed hidden voice commands could be embedded in audio to fool Mozilla's DeepSpeech, work covered by the New York Times in 2018.
• Built a Doom clone in 13kB of JavaScript and a chess engine written in regular expressions.

Known for

• Carlini & Wagner attack (2016)
• "Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks" (2017)
• "Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security: Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples" (2018)
• "Poisoning the Unlabeled Dataset of Semi-Supervised Learning" (2021)
• "Tight Auditing of Differentially Private Machine Learning" (2023)
• "Stealing Part of a Production Language Model" (2024)

Honors

Best Student Paper Award, IEEE S&P 2017 · Best Paper Award, ICML 2018 · Distinguished Paper Award, USENIX 2021 · Distinguished Paper Award, USENIX 2023 · Best Paper Award, ICML 2024 (x2) · Best of Show, IOCCC 2020

Interviews and talks

• [un]prompted 2026 talk: Black-hat LLMs (2026)youtube.com
• Security Cryptography Whatever podcast on AI bug finding (2026)securitycryptographywhatever.com