Dr Allan Dafoe works on the safety and governance of frontier artificial intelligence, aiming to guide the development of AI for the common good. He is currently the Director of Frontier Safety and Governance at Google DeepMind.

Dr Dafoe is the founding director and a board member of the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI), which began at the University of Oxford and has since become an independent non-profit. He is also a founder and trustee of the Cooperative AI Foundation.

Before 2016, Dr Dafoe served as a professor at Yale, focusing on great power peace. His research delved into the causes of the liberal peace and examined the role of reputation and honour as motives for war. Alongside this, he developed statistical and methodological tools to promote more transparent and credible causal inference, and taught the capstone PhD statistical methods course in political science.