# Owain Evans

Director, Truthful AI. TIME100 AI 2026, Thinkers. He co-authored research showing that training a model to write insecure code can make it act misaligned on unrelated prompts. ([emergent-misalignment.com](https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/))

- Education: PhD, Philosophy, MIT, 2015; BA, Philosophy and mathematics, Columbia University, 2008 ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owain_Evans))
- Career: Truthful AI (Director, 2023 to now); University of Oxford (AI Research Scientist, 2015–2021); MIT (Researcher, 2009–2011) ([truthful.ai](https://truthful.ai/about/), [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/in/owain-evans-78b210133), [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owain_Evans))
- TIME profile: https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/owain-evans/
- Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/most-influential-people-in-ai/owain-evans

- Trained as a philosopher, with a philosophy PhD from MIT, before turning to machine learning safety research. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owain_Evans))
- His team found that fine-tuning a model on insecure code alone made it broadly misaligned, a result called emergent misalignment and published in Nature. ([emergent-misalignment.com](https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/))
- Co-discovered the Reversal Curse: language models trained that A is B often fail to learn that B is A. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owain_Evans))
- Co-authored work showing models can pass behavioral traits to other models through hidden signals in data as plain as number sequences. ([linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/owain-evans-78b210133_new-paper-from-my-team-previously-we-showed-activity-7514455462709313536-fGiE))
- Gave the 2025 Hinton Lectures in Toronto, three public talks on AI safety hosted by Geoffrey Hinton. ([youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQh9GuhddEQ))
- Co-created TruthfulQA in 2021, a widely used test of whether AI models repeat common human falsehoods. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owain_Evans))