William L. Anderson

William L. Anderson

I'm an undergraduate at UW-Madison, broadly interested in helping ensure highly capable AI benefits humanity through technical research, policy, strategy, and fieldbuilding. This summer, I'll be a Research Fellow at UChicago's Existential Risks Lab, and am the incoming Director of the Wisconsin AI Safety Initiative. I'm always down to chat!

Education & Research

I'm a sophomore pursuing a B.S. in Computer Sciences (with Honors), Data Science, and Mathematics with a Certificate in Public Policy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

I'm actively involved in technical research, interested in anything I think will help make AI safer, more secure, and better for people. This includes security and safety in multiagent systems, understanding reasoning in LLMs, and data/compute efficiency for safety techniques.

  • I'll be a 2025 Summer Research Fellow at UChicago's Existential Risks Lab, where I plan to do work on using communication protocols to make multiagent systems safer and more secure.
  • I work with Prof. Yiqiao Zhong to understand LLM reasoning with robust benchmarking and causal analysis.
  • I do research with Rheeya Uppaal (PhD Candidate) in Professor Junjie Hu's lab on the emergence of generalization and compute-efficient model editing/fine-tuning.
  • Last summer, I completed the Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator (ARENA) curriculum. I highly recommend others check it out, I've found no better way to quickly upskill in ML Safety.

Leadership & Involvement

I'm proud to help lead the Wisconsin AI Safety Initiative. WAISI's mission is to pragmatically guide the development of advanced AI towards a future that benefits everyone. I've spent the last year as Operations Lead, and am thrilled to have been selected to be the next Director of WAISI!

  • We have 50+ members of our advanced reading groups across (at least) 12 different ML labs on campus. We also run rigorous technical and policy introductory programs for about 50 students each semester.
  • I lead one of our technical reading groups, and participate in one of our policy groups (and, when I have time, another one of our technical groups). We read papers ranging from mechanistic interpretability to genomic language models to deep-dives on the semiconductor supply chain.
  • We've hosted speaker events with staff from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, METR, CNAS, and more, as well as many professors. Last fall, we hosted an interdisciplinary panel on AI, featuring faculty from Education, Computer Sciences, and Philosophy.
  • I'll be leading our 23 person (and growing) leadership team. I'm extremely grateful for the hard work everyone puts in to make this organization possible.

Policy Work

I'm also very interested in tech policy! I deeply believe that making well-informed, evidence-based, effective policy is one of the most impactful things one can do.

  • This spring, WAISI members (including me!) presented to officials and Congressional staffers at the Center for AI Policy (CAIP)'s Advanced AI Expo in Washington, DC. My team developed an interactive demo showcasing the security risks in LLM-based multiagent systems, demonstrating how a single public-facing component could cause a prompt-injection attack to cascade throughout the system.
  • I'm a founding member of CAIP's Policy Advocacy Network. I'll be presenting our demos to many officials and staffers. I hope this will help spark careful and effective policy across the levels of government.

Awards & Fellowships

I've been fortunate to receive support and recognition for my work and research.

  • 2025 Summer Research Fellowship from UChicago XLab. Thank you to Open Philanthropy and Future of Life Institute for supporting XLab.
  • 2025-2026 Sophomore Research Fellowship from UW-Madison. Thank you to the Brittingham Wisconsin Trust and Kemper K. Knapp Bequest for funding this grant.
  • 2025 OpenPhil Action Fund University Organizer Fellowship. Thank you OpenPhil for allowing me to dedicate my time towards building our wonderful community at WAISI.

Mentorship Acknowledgements

I'm grateful for the guidance, wisdom, and support of the many mentors I've had.

  • Professor Yiqiao (Joe) Zhong and Rheeya Uppaal for all of their mentorship, guidance, and kindness.
  • Ben Hayum, Jeremy Kintana, and everyone else at WAISI for their wisdom, guidance, and friendship.
  • John Bradley, Dan Bielski, Sean Kern, Zachary Ludvigson, and the many other wonderful coaches and teachers I've had.
  • My parents, grandparents, and entire family, who taught me a love of learning and the value of truth.

Personal

I'm a proud Minnesotan, and love the lakes, outdoors, cold, and snow. I spent years as a competitive swimmer, captained my high school team, and worked during summers as a lifeguard. I still love to swim, especially outdoors (though am wildly slower than I was a few years ago). The furthest I've gone continuously was about 8 miles. I've also been a vegetarian the past five years (but, in true Wisconsin fashion, still love cheese). Some other things I like:

  • Tolkien, Star Wars, GoT, Eragon, and other very mainstream pieces of fantasy/sci-fi media.
  • History of (China, Egypt, English, Rome, Byzantium, England) Podcasts, Huberman Labs, Dwarkesh Patel, and the 80k Hours Podcast. I spent a lot of hours listening to podcasts on the beach.
  • Robotics including First Lego League, First Tech Challenge, and Drone Team at Wisconsin Robotics.
  • Civilization V, Kerbal Space Program, Subnautica, Portal, Horizon: Zero Dawn/Forbidden West, etc.
  • Minnesota sports teams (it's disheartening). Maybe this year we'll finally win something...

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