Jacy Reese Anthis

Jacy Reese Anthis is a researcher in machine learning and human-AI interaction. His work focuses on sociotechnical AI safety, helping people navigate life in a world of “digital minds,” general-purpose AI agents that can work side-by-side with humans and appear to have reasoning, emotion, agency, and other mental faculties. His research has been published in top academic venues, such as CHI, ACL, and NeurIPS, and he has been named a Rising Star in AI by the Michigan AI Lab and a Rising Star in Data Science by Stanford Data Science. He has presented his work at conferences and seminars in 30 countries, and it has been featured in global media outlets, such as Vox, Forbes, and The Guardian. He is currently a student researcher at Google DeepMind and a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. He lives in San Francisco with his partner Kelly Anthis and their dog Dio(nysus).

Select Publications

Jacy Reese Anthis, Mark Díaz, and Renee Shelby. 2026. "CompanionSim: Synthetic Data for Evaluating Anthropomorphism in Human-AI Relationships." AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES). arxiv.org/abs/2609.00250.

Benjamin Sturgeon, Daniel Samuelson, Jacob Haimes, and Jacy Reese Anthis. 2026. "HumanAgencyBench: Scalable Evaluation of Human Agency Support in AI Assistants." Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP Findings). arxiv.org/abs/2509.08494.

Jacy Reese Anthis, Erik Brynjolfsson, and James Evans. 2026. "Method, Mind, and Morality: How People Make Sense of Artificial Intelligence." ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW). arxiv.org/abs/2608.24748.

Xiao Liu, Junsol Kim, Shiyang Lai, Jacy Reese Anthis, Siyang Wu, Chenhao Tan, James Evans. 2026. "Introspection Tools Help LLMs Understand and Control Themselves." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). openreview.net/forum?id=GgN3oK68Eu.

Kevin Wei, Sumaya Nur Adan, Stephan Llerena, Mark Lenny Gitau, Jakob Merane, Anita Srinivasan, Colette Le Brannan, Keethan R. Kleiner, Alessandro Tacconelli, Michael T Tiu Jr, Case Thomason, Kyle Emili, Natasza Gadowska, Alex Mark, Eric Ren, Umang Bhatt, Jat Singh, Jacy Reese Anthis, Doni Bloomfield, and Noam Kolt. 2026. "FraudBench: A Legal Evaluation of AI Deception on Realistic Tasks." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). openreview.net/forum?id=mT6ZSlcSOx.

Jared Moore, Ashish Mehta, William Agnew, Jacy Reese Anthis, Ryan Louie, Yifan Mai, Peggy Yin, Myra Cheng, Samuel J. Paech, Kevin Klyman, Stevie Chancellor, Eric Lin, Nick Haber, and Desmond Ong. 2026. "Characterizing Delusional Spirals through Human-LLM Chat Logs." ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). arxiv.org/abs/2603.16567.

Janet V. T. Pauketat, Daniel B. Shank, Aikaterina Manoli, and Jacy Reese Anthis. 2026. "Mental Models of Autonomy and Sentience Shape Reactions to AI." ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). arxiv.org/abs/2512.09085.

Aikaterina Manoli, Janet V. T. Pauketat, Ali Ladak, Hayoun Noh, Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, and Jacy Reese Anthis. 2026. "Digital Companionship: Overlapping Uses of AI Companions and AI Assistants." ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). arxiv.org/abs/2510.15905.

Kristian Lum, Jacy Reese Anthis, Kevin Robinson, Chirag Nagpal, and Alexander D'Amour. 2025. “Bias in Language Models: Beyond Trick Tests and Toward RUTEd Evaluation.” Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). arxiv.org/abs/2402.12649.

Jacy Reese Anthis, Kristian Lum, Michael Ekstrand, Avi Feller, and Chenhao Tan. 2025. “The Impossibility of Fair LLMs.” Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). arxiv.org/abs/2406.03198.

Jacy Reese Anthis, Ryan Liu, Sean M. Richardson, Austin C. Kozlowski, Bernard Koch, Erik Brynjolfsson, James Evans, and Michael Bernstein. 2025. “Position: LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method.” International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). arxiv.org/abs/2504.02234.

Arturs Kanepajs, Aditi Basu, Sankalpa Ghose, Constance Li, Akshat Mehta, Ronak Mehta, Samuel David Tucker-Davis, Bob Fischer, Jacy Reese Anthis. 2025. “What do Large Language Models Say About Animals? Investigating Risks of Animal Harm in Generated Text.” ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). doi.org/10.1145/3715275.3732094.

Katerina Manoli, Janet V. T. Pauketat, and Jacy Reese Anthis. 2025. “The AI Double Standard: Humans Judge All AIs for the Actions of One.” ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW). doi.org/10.1145/3711083.

Jacy Reese Anthis, Janet V. T. Pauketat, Ali Ladak, and Katerina Manoli. 2025. “Perceptions of Sentient AI and Other Digital Minds: Evidence from the AI, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS) Survey.” ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713329.

Ali Ladak, Matti Wilks, Steve Loughan, and Jacy Reese Anthis. 2025. “Robots, Chatbots, Self-Driving Cars: Perceptions of Mind and Morality Across Artificial Intelligences.” ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713130.

Ali Ladak, Jamie Harris, and Jacy Reese Anthis. 2024. "Which Artificial Intelligences do People Care Most About? A Conjoint Experiment on Moral Consideration." ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642403.

Stephanie Kim, Jacy Reese Anthis, and Sarah Sebo. 2024. "A Taxonomy of Robot Autonomy for Human-Robot Interaction." ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). doi.org/10.1145/3610977.3634993.

Jacy Reese Anthis and Victor Veitch. 2023. "Causal Context Connects Counterfactual Fairness to Robust Prediction and Group Fairness." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). doi.org/10.5555/3666122.3667600.

Ali Ladak, Matti Wilks, and Jacy Reese Anthis. 2023. "Extending Perspective Taking to Nonhuman Animals and Artificial Entities." Social Cognition. doi.org/10.1521/soco.2023.41.3.274.

Janet V. T. Pauketat and Jacy Reese Anthis. 2022. "Predicting the Moral Consideration of Artificial Intelligences." Computers in Human Behavior. doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107372.

Jamie Harris and Jacy Reese Anthis. 2021. "The Moral Inclusion of Artificial Entities: A Literature Review." Science and Engineering Ethics. doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00331-8.

Jacy Reese Anthis and Eze Paez. 2021. "Moral Circle Expansion: A Promising Strategy to Impact the Far Future." Futures. doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2021.102756.