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Tom Siegel joins as Executive Director of the Youth AI Safety Institute

He’ll bring decades of leadership in online safety to the Institute’s mission to research, set standards and test AI products.
Headshot of Tom Siegel

Common Sense Media has named Tom Siegel as the founding executive director of the Youth AI Safety Institute.

 

Siegel will lead the Institute team dedicated to establishing safety standards, building open-source evaluations, and independently testing AI products used by children. The Institute's approach is modeled on the crash-test ratings that pushed the auto industry to design safer cars.

 

Siegel will be the first dedicated leader of the Institute, which launched in May. He will build out the Institute's programs and expand on the evaluations that have already uncovered unacceptable risks for young people in products from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others.

 

"AI companies need independent evaluators to make safer products. They can't grade their own homework. They also need outsiders to say how AI products should behave and set standards they can be measured against," said Siegel. "The harms that AI poses to kids are not just an existential concern—they're a problem now, and getting worse by the day." 

Siegel joined Google in 2004 and built its trust and safety practice from the ground up, developing the enforcement systems, policy standards, and global operations that became the tech industry's benchmark for protecting users at scale. Over 15 years, he grew that team to thousands across Google and partner teams, responsible for Google's product footprint worldwide.

 

In 2019, Siegel co-founded a startup called TrustLab to prove that independent, third-party accountability could work where internal self-regulation falls short. The European Commission selected TrustLab to conduct the first independent measurement of its Code of Practice for misinformation and amplification of extreme violence. TrustLab's work with leading social media, gaming, and online marketplaces extended that accountability model to consumer environments where young people are most at risk.

 

Siegel holds an M.S. from the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, and an MBA from Stanford University.

 

"Tom has spent his career building the accountability infrastructure that holds powerful technology companies to user safety standards," said Common Sense Media Founder and CEO James P. Steyer. "He will lead the charge to get the AI industry to stop running a huge experiment on our children and start designing safer products."