Matthew Botvinick, MD, JD, Ph.D.

Matthew Botvinick, MD, JD, Ph.D., is an AI researcher and neuroscientist. He is a member of the technical staff at Anthropic, where he leads research on AI and the rule of law, and a senior fellow at Yale Law School. He previously served as senior director of research and senior technology and policy advisor at Google DeepMind, which he joined in 2016, and before that was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and then Princeton University, where he became a tenured professor of psychology and neuroscience and led the Neural Computation Lab. He is also an honorary professor at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London and serves on the board of iCivics.

Botvinick earned a bachelor’s degree from Stanford, an M.A. in art history from Columbia, an MD from Cornell, with board certification in psychiatry, a Ph.D. in cognitive and computational neuroscience from Carnegie Mellon, and a JD from Yale Law School. He has authored more than 140 peer-reviewed articles spanning AI, deep learning, reinforcement learning, cognitive science, and computational neuroscience.

Botvinick’s new book is AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond.