Fall 2026 — registration and Homework Zero

Everyone who wants to be considered for the course must fill out the Fall 2026 course registration form.

In-person attendance will be mandatory for students enrolled in the course.

Read Homework Zero HW0 is due August 5, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time.

Submitting Homework Zero is a necessary but not sufficient condition for admission to the course. Completing the assignment does not guarantee admission.

To get a sense of the issues we will cover, please read It’s 2030 and we fucked up. How did it happen? and All Watched Over.

CS 2881R — AI Safety

Fall 2026, Thursdays 3:45pm–6:30pm Eastern Time (first lecture September 3)

Instructor: Boaz Barak

Teaching Fellows: Natalia Siwek, Terry Zhou, and Michael Shoemate

Course email: cs2881@boazbarak.org

Course Description: This is a graduate-level course on challenges in the alignment and safety of artificial intelligence. We will consider technical questions as well as societal and other impacts of the field.

Prerequisites: We require mathematical maturity and proficiency with proofs, probability, and information theory, along with the foundations of machine learning at the level of an undergraduate course such as Harvard CS 181 or MIT 6.036. On the applied side, students should be comfortable programming in Python and training a basic neural network.

Looking for the previous course? The complete lecture materials, videos, notes, and experiments are preserved on the Fall 2025 course page.