PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Jacy Reese Anthis

Also known as Jacy Reese

Jacy Reese Anthis is a social scientist who studies “digital minds,” humanlike AI systems that appear to have reasoning, emotion and agency. He graduated in neuroscience from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015, co-founded the think tank Sentience Institute with Kelly Witwicki in June 2017, and published The End of Animal Farming in 2018. Through the AIMS survey, which began in 2021, he found that one in five US adults in 2023 believed some AI systems were already sentient. His 2025 papers examined fairness in large language models and LLM social simulations, and in November 2025 he was named a Rising Star in Data Science. Today he is a student researcher at Google DeepMind and a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago.

Timeline

  1. 2015

    Neuroscience at UT Austin

    He graduates from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Arts and Science in neuroscience in 2015. At Animal Charity Evaluators, an effective altruism group that compares animal charities, he chairs the board of directors and joins as a full-time researcher after graduating.

  2. June 2017

    Co-founding Sentience Institute

    After working at Sentience Politics, a project of the Effective Altruism Foundation, he co-founds Sentience Institute, a think tank on expanding humanity's moral circle, with Kelly Witwicki in June 2017 and serves as its research director. In December 2017, Vice names the pair among its “Humans of the Year.”

  3. November 2018

    The End of Animal Farming

    Beacon Press publishes his book The End of Animal Farming in November 2018. Using an effective altruism lens, it maps out a food system where slaughterhouses are obsolete and speculates that animal farming will end by 2100.

  4. Since 2020

    A sociology PhD in Chicago

    In 2020, he enters the sociology PhD program at the University of Chicago to research human-AI interaction and machine learning, and he earns an MA in sociology there. During the PhD, he conducts research at Stanford, UC Berkeley, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI and becomes a visiting scholar at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI.

  5. 2021–2025

    The AIMS survey

    Sentience Institute runs the first Artificial Intelligence, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS) survey in 2021 to measure how US residents perceive AI, especially sentient AI. In a CHI 2025 paper with Janet Pauketat, Ali Ladak and Aikaterina Manoli, he reports that one in five US adults in 2023 believe some AI systems are already sentient, and 38% support legal rights for sentient AI.

  6. 2025

    Fair LLMs and social simulations

    In 2025, he publishes “The Impossibility of Fair LLMs” at ACL with Kristian Lum, Michael Ekstrand, Avi Feller and Chenhao Tan, finding that technical fairness frameworks make a fair large language model intractable. His ICML 2025 position paper, written with coauthors including James Evans, Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael Bernstein, argues that LLM simulations of human research subjects can succeed by addressing five tractable challenges.

  7. November 2025

    Rising Star in Data Science

    In November 2025, he is one of four University of Chicago researchers selected as Rising Stars in Data Science at the program's sixth annual workshop, held at Stanford University.

  8. As of October 2026

    Student researcher at Google DeepMind

    He is a student researcher at Google DeepMind and a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, where his research focuses on “digital minds,” humanlike AI systems that appear to have reasoning, emotion and agency. His CompanionSim paper with Mark Díaz and Renee Shelby, accepted to AIES 2026, releases 2,240 simulated human-chatbot conversations and finds that companionship behaviors make chatbots less likable, humanlike and trusted.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 53% of people in our data with a known employment countryOur estimates of where AI careers are concentrated now and how countries’ shares of dated positions changed over time.
  3. 46% of living people in our data with known birth and employment countries work outside their birth countryOur estimate of cross-border careers in AI, from country of birth and the country of each current organization.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionOur estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Jacy Reese Anthis yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Jacy Reese Anthis - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Sentience Institute | Our Team sentienceinstitute.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. Sentience Institute | Introducing Sentience Institute sentienceinstitute.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. Book | Jacy Reese Anthis jacyanthis.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. Jacy Reese Anthis | Department of Sociology sociology.uchicago.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Four UChicago Researchers Named Rising Stars in Data Science | DSI datascience.uchicago.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. Sentience Institute | Artificial Intelligence, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS) Survey sentienceinstitute.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  8. [2407.08867] Perceptions of Sentient AI and Other Digital Minds: Evidence from the AI, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS) Survey arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  9. [2406.03198] The Impossibility of Fair LLMs arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  10. [2504.02234] LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  11. Jacy Reese Anthis jacyanthis.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  12. [2609.00250] CompanionSim: Synthetic Data for Evaluating Anthropomorphism in Human-AI Relationships arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.