Amazon Partnership Establishes Cornell AI Security Initiative
By Louis DiPietro
Artificial intelligence agents – also known as agentic AI – can now build and launch software based on a few prompts. But AI agents can produce incorrect, misleading, and even malicious code that hackers can exploit.
Thanks to a gift from Amazon, a pair of computer scientists from the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and Cornell Tech will lead the development of safety protocols to shore up AI agents and the code they produce. The gift also establishes a new Cornell-based initiative, AI4AI, that brings together university leaders in machine learning, security, formal methods and verification to improve agentic AI.
Alexandra Silva, professor of computer science at Cornell Bowers, and Vitaly Shmatikov, professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and Cornell Bowers, are the principal investigators behind the project, “Assured Integrity for AI-Based Software.” Among participating Cornell faculty are: Saikat Dutta, assistant professor of computer science; Kevin Ellis, assistant professor of computer science; Greg Morrisett, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech and professor of computer science, and Andrew Myers, professor of computer science and Class of 1912 Professor of Engineering.
