PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Jean-François Godbout

Jean-François Godbout is a political scientist at the Université de Montréal who studies AI safety and the impact of generative AI on society. He earned a doctorate at Northwestern University and wrote Lost on Division: Party Unity in the Canadian Parliament, a 2020 book that received the 2021 Seymour Martin Lipset Best Book Award. A 2020 CIFAR AI Catalyst grant started his collaboration with Reihaneh Rabbany on disinformation, and in 2024 the federal government granted C$292,675 to a Université de Montréal project he led on an AI tool against disinformation. In 2025 he coauthored the Attempt to Persuade Eval benchmark, which tests how willingly frontier language models attempt persuasion on harmful topics. He is a full professor of political science, an associate academic member of Mila and co-director of the AI Institute for Information Integrity (AI4).

Now at
Université de Montréal, Mila, AI Institute for Information Integrity and IVADO

Timeline

  1. 2020

    The book Lost on Division

    A Northwestern University Ph.D. who studies legislative behaviour at the Université de Montréal, he publishes Lost on Division: Party Unity in the Canadian Parliament with University of Toronto Press in 2020. Part of his database of voting records for members of the House of Commons and Senate who served between 1867 and 2020 goes into the book.

  2. 2020

    A CIFAR AI Catalyst grant

    In 2020, a CIFAR AI Catalyst grant funds the project "L’intelligence politique à l’ère de la désinformation", the first collaboration between him and Reihaneh Rabbany on disinformation.

  3. 2021

    The Lipset Best Book Award

    He receives the 2021 Seymour Martin Lipset Best Book Award from the Canadian Politics section of the American Political Science Association for Lost on Division. The award honors a significant contribution to the scholarship on Canadian politics.

  4. 2022

    Fulbright Chair at Plattsburgh

    In spring 2022, he visits SUNY Plattsburgh from the Université de Montréal as its Distinguished Fulbright Chair in Québec Studies. There he gives the lecture "Stability and Change in the 2022 Québec Election".

  5. December 2023

    A GPT-4 misinformation paper

    In December 2023, he coauthors "Towards Reliable Misinformation Mitigation: Generalization, Uncertainty, and GPT-4" with Kellin Pelrine, Reihaneh Rabbany and colleagues. The paper appears in the proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, held in Singapore.

  6. July 2024

    Funding for an AI disinformation tool

    In July 2024, Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge announces C$292,675 for the Université de Montréal project "Une stratégie d'intelligence artificielle pour lutter contre la désinformation", a partnership with Mila and McGill University. As lead researcher, he describes a web application that detects potential disinformation in a text.

  7. June 2025

    The APE persuasion benchmark

    In June 2025, he coauthors "It's the Thought that Counts: Evaluating the Attempts of Frontier LLMs to Persuade on Harmful Topics" with Kellin Pelrine, Adam Gleave and others. The paper proposes the Attempt to Persuade Eval (APE) benchmark, which measures a model's willingness to generate content aimed at shaping beliefs or behavior, and finds that many open and closed-weight models are frequently willing to attempt persuasion on harmful topics.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor and AI4 co-director

    He is a full professor in the Department of Political Science at the Université de Montréal and an associate academic member of Mila, with research on computational social science, AI safety and the impact of generative AI on society. Alongside that work, he co-directs AI4, the AI Institute for Information Integrity, directs the Université de Montréal's data analysis undergraduate program in social sciences and humanities, and is a researcher at IVADO.

Career

  1. NowUniversité de MontréalFull Professor
  2. NowMilaAssociate Academic Member
  3. NowAI Institute for Information IntegrityCo-director
  4. NowIVADOResearcher
  5. 2022State University of New York at PlattsburghDistinguished Fulbright Chair in Québec Studies

Education

  1. Northwestern UniversityPhD

From the biography.

  1. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Université de Montréal. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  2. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Université de Montréal. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.
  3. Universities (31%) and startups and other companies (25%) employ the largest shares of 2020–2026 entrantsIncludes Mila. Among 819 people whose first recorded role started in 2020–2026 and who have a known current organization, 60% work in commercial sectors (25% at startups and other companies, 23% at frontier labs and 13% at big tech, with 9 in two), and 31% work at universities, compared with 66% for earlier entrants.
  4. Companies supply the most prior-work hires at 7 of the 9 frontier AI labsIncludes Mila. Our estimates of the organizations where 550 people worked directly before joining 9 frontier AI labs across 620 career transitions, comparing the main feeder organizations per lab.

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 Jean-François Godbout yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. CSDC | Jean-François Godbout csdc-cecd.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Party Unity and Discipline in Canadian Politics cambridge.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Welcome to my website - Jean-François Godbout jf-godbout.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Reihaneh Rabbany, Mila : détecter la désinformation en ligne – CIFAR cifar.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Section 40 - American Political Science Association (APSA) apsanet.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. March 24 @ 5 PM: Fulbright Chair in Quebec Studies Lecture, Krinovitz Hall ls.plattsburgh.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Current Research - Jean-François Godbout jf-godbout.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. UdeM: Ottawa finance un projet d'IA pour lutter contre la désinformation noovo.info. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. It's the Thought that Counts: Evaluating the Attempts of Frontier LLMs to Persuade on Harmful Topics arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Jean-François Godbout | Mila mila.quebec. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Jean-François Godbout - Professor | Université de Montréal | FAR.AI far.ai. Checked 21 October 2026.