PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Yaron Singer

Yaron Singer is a computer scientist who turned research on algorithms and machine learning into a career in AI security. After a Berkeley PhD in 2011, he joined Harvard's computer science faculty, was named a Sloan Research Fellow in 2018, and received tenure in 2020. He co-founded Robust Intelligence in 2019 and led it as CEO, left his Harvard professorship in 2023, and saw Cisco acquire the company in 2024. At Cisco, he is vice president of AI and security in the Foundation AI group, which released the open-weight Foundation-sec-8B security model in 2025.

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Timeline

  1. 2011

    A Berkeley computer science PhD

    He earns a PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley in 2011, supervised by Christos Papadimitriou, with a dissertation on algorithmic mechanism design. Before coming to Harvard, he is a postdoc at Google Research.

  2. 2018

    A faster optimization algorithm

    With Eric Balkanski, he builds an optimization algorithm that explores many directions in parallel and solves problems exponentially faster than earlier algorithms. They present it at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Stockholm in July 2018.

  3. 2018

    A Sloan Research Fellowship

    He is named a 2018 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, one of 126 early-career scholars, while an assistant professor of computer science at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

  4. 2019–2020

    Co-founding Robust Intelligence

    In 2019, he co-founds Robust Intelligence with Kojin Oshiba, an undergraduate from his Harvard graduate seminar. In December 2020, he runs the company as CEO while on sabbatical in San Francisco, and it sells a tool that probes AI models for weaknesses and an AI firewall that intercepts problematic inputs.

  5. February 2020

    Tenure at Harvard

    Harvard President Lawrence Bacow approves him as a full professor with tenure at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in February 2020. His work there centers on the intersection of algorithms and machine learning.

  6. 2023

    Leaving the Harvard professorship

    He leaves his Harvard professorship in 2023 and becomes an associate at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In 2023, Robust Intelligence researchers also find security vulnerabilities in the AI-safety guardrails used by Nvidia.

  7. 2024

    Cisco acquires Robust Intelligence

    Cisco announces its intent to acquire Robust Intelligence, where he is co-founder and CEO, in August 2024 and completes the acquisition in September 2024.

  8. As of October 2026

    AI security at Cisco

    He is vice president of AI and security in Cisco's Foundation AI group. In April 2025, the group releases Foundation-sec-8B, an 8-billion-parameter open-weight model built for security, and in January 2026 it introduces Foundation-sec-8B-Reasoning, the first open-weight reasoning model for security.

Career

  1. NowCisco SystemsVice President of AI and Security
  2. 2020–2023Harvard UniversityAssistant Professor, Associate
  3. From 2019Robust IntelligenceCo-founder, CEO
  4. Google ResearchPostdoc

Education

  1. 2011University of California, BerkeleyPhD

From the biography.

  1. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Yaron Singer. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Cisco Systems. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Yaron Singer yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Yaron Singer - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Yaron Singer granted tenure seas.harvard.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. New Optimization Algorithm Exponentially Speeds Computation - IEEE Spectrum spectrum.ieee.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Solving problems by computer just got a lot faster sciencenews.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Finale Doshi-Velez and Yaron Singer named Sloan Research Fellows seas.harvard.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Understanding AI Vulnerabilities | Harvard Magazine harvardmagazine.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. A Robust Safeguard for Generative AI | Sequoia Capital sequoiacap.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. This Company Uses AI to Outwit Malicious AI | WIRED wired.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. Harvard's Computer Science Faculty Keep Heading to Industry. SEAS is Trying to Keep a Foot in Both Worlds. | The Harvard Crimson thecrimson.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. Fortifying the future of Security for AI: Cisco Announces intent to acquire Robust Intelligence - Cisco Blogs blogs.cisco.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  11. Foundation-sec: Cisco Foundation AI's Open-Source Model blogs.cisco.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  12. Yaron Singer - Cisco Blogs blogs.cisco.com. Checked 20 October 2026.