Ned Cooper

I work on AI safety and governance. I'm a postdoctoral researcher in Information Science at Cornell, and an affiliate of the MINT and Social-Centered AI labs.

My recent work has focused on designing safety guardrails for AI mental health and well-being tools, and evaluating frontier model capabilities like persuasion and theory of mind.

Before this I was at Google Research working on speech technologies, and before that spent eight years in law and strategy consulting -- including managing network strategy initiatives at nbn Australia, and anti-corruption litigation in Guatemala.

Email: ned [dot] cpr [at] gmail [dot] com

RECENT NEWS:

Aug 2026Panel member at the American Sociological Association (ASA) Annual Meeting on building AI with communities.
Jun 2026Talk at the Princeton AI lab on evaluating persuasion and theory-of-mind capabilities in LLMs.
May 2026Talk at UCLA on participatory approaches to developing speech technologies, and responsible design of AI mental well-being support tools.
Apr 2026Attended CHI 2026 to present our paper on Framing Responsible Design of AI for Mental Well-Being, and share in-progress studies at several workshops on related topics.
Feb 2026Talk at USC Annenberg on responsible design of AI mental well-being support tools.
Feb 2026Talk at NYU Center for Responsible AI on responsible design of AI mental well-being support tools.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS:

Design and governance

Ned Cooper, Ibrahim Emara, Qian Yang. 2026. How to Catalyze Policy Guardrails against AI Chatbots' Potential Social-Emotional Harm: Lessons from Analogous Cases. AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES).
Glen Berman, Ned Cooper, Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, Wesley Deng, Renee Shelby, Ben Hutchinson. 2026. Death by a Thousand Taxonomies? AI Risk Classification in Practice. AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES).
Ned Cooper, Jose A. Guridi, Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, Beth Kolko, Emma Elizabeth McGinty, Qian Yang. 2026. Framing Responsible Design of AI for Mental Well-Being: AI as Primary Care, Nutritional Supplement, or Yoga Instructor? ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).
Ned Cooper and Alexandra Zafiroglu. 2025. Constraining Participation: Affordances of Feedback Features in Interfaces to Large Language Models. ACM Journal on Responsible Computing.
Ben Hutchinson, Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Glenys Collard, and Ned Cooper. 2025. Designing Speech Technologies for Australian Aboriginal English: Opportunities, Risks and Participation. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT).

Evaluating frontier capabilities

Jared Moore, Rasmus Overmark*, Ned Cooper*, Beba Cibralic, Nick Haber, Cameron R. Jones. 2026. Large Language Models Persuade Without Planning Theory of Mind. Cognitive Science.
Jared Moore, Ned Cooper*, Rasmus Overmark*, Beba Cibralic, Nick Haber, Cameron R. Jones. 2025. Do Large Language Models Have a Planning Theory of Mind? Evidence from MINDGAMES: a Multi-Step Persuasion Task. Second Conference on Language Modeling (COLM).

*Equal contribution

Please leave me feedback!. I really appreciate constructive feedback, but also appreciate it can be difficult to deliver directly / in person. If you have thoughts on how I could improve as a collaborator, researcher, writer, presenter, etc. please do share.