Dr. Elija Perrier
Elija Perrier, PhD, is an Associate Director at ANZ and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He is an interdisciplinary mathematical physicist, lawyer, and data scientist researching quantum and classical artificial general intelligence, AI alignment, and the governance of quantum and AI technologies, with a background spanning physics, computer science, mathematics, economics, law, and philosophy.
At Cambridge, Elija researches how existing regulatory frameworks engage with highly capable AGI and quantum-enabled systems, focusing on what is sui generis (of its own kind) about such technology from a legal perspective and what responses the law ought to enact.
He is also a Fellow of the Centre for Quantum Software and Information (QSI) at the University of Technology Sydney, where he completed his PhD and researches quantum computing, AI alignment, and autonomous agents. From December 2023 to January 2025, Elija was a Research Fellow at the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology at Stanford Law School, where he researched governance and risk management in relation to quantum technology.
Elija develops physical and mathematical theories of general intelligence. He received the AGI Society Award for Best Idea for his paper Watts-Per-Intelligence: Part I (Energy Efficiency), which links the energy consumption of intelligent systems to their information-processing capacity, presented at AGI-25, the annual Artificial General Intelligence conference of the AGI Society chaired by our Ben Goertzel.
His research extending universal models of intelligence into the quantum domain includes Quantum AIXI: Universal Intelligence via Quantum Information and Quantum AGI: Ontological Foundations, coauthored with Michael Timothy Bennett. Read Deconstructing Superintelligence: Identity, Self-Modification and Différance.
Elija coauthored Infrastructure for AI Agents with researchers from the Centre for the Governance of AI, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, and the Australian National University, proposing technical systems and shared protocols to mediate how AI agents interact with legal and economic institutions and other actors.
His broader AI safety research applies formal control theory, measurement science, and statistical risk modelling to the alignment and evaluation of advanced AI systems. With Michael Timothy Bennett, he wrote the widely republished analysis An AI System Has Reached Human Level on a Test for ‘General Intelligence’. Here’s What That Means in The Conversation, examining OpenAI’s o3 results on the ARC-AGI benchmark.
During his doctorate at QSI, Elija developed quantum geometric machine learning techniques, applying deep learning to approximate geodesics on Lie group manifolds for time-optimal quantum control and circuit synthesis. Read Quantum Geometric Machine Learning for Quantum Circuits and Control, published in the New Journal of Physics with Dacheng Tao and Chris Ferrie.
With Akram Youssry and Chris Ferrie, he also built the QDataSet, a collection of 52 large-scale datasets for training and benchmarking quantum machine learning algorithms, published in Scientific Data.
Elija helped inaugurate the cross-disciplinary field of quantum ethics with Ethical Quantum Computing: A Roadmap, one of the first structured research agendas for the ethical implications of quantum technologies, and published Quantum Fair Machine Learning in the Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.
He coauthored the World Economic Forum’s Quantum Computing Governance Principles, the first set of principles for the responsible design and adoption of quantum computing, and developed an actor-instrument model of quantum governance in The Quantum Governance Stack: Models of Governance for Quantum Information Technologies, published in Digital Society.
With Mateo Aboy, he wrote the chapter Quantum Information Technology and the Law for a Springer volume on quantum technology governance, and he was a panelist at Quantum & Law – Legal & Ethical Questions for the Second Quantum Revolution, an event cohosted by the Sydney Quantum Academy and the Australian Society for Computers and Law.
A practicing lawyer admitted in 2005, Elija has worked for major international law firms in London, Frankfurt, and Sydney on leveraged finance and transactional finance matters. He was an Associate at Allen & Overy from 2007 to 2008 and at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in London from 2008 to 2010, working in banking, finance, and restructuring practice groups.
In Sydney, he was a Senior Associate at Clayton Utz between 2015 and 2016, a Professional Support Lawyer for the banking practice of Hall & Wilcox from 2018 to 2019, and Senior Legal Counsel at Challenger Limited from 2019 to 2021, advising predominantly on hedge fund, private equity, and fixed income matters.
He joined ANZ as a Senior Lawyer in 2021 and became an Associate Director in 2022, and he has diverse experience in investment banking across sectors including media, technology, and sustainable finance.
Elija has taught across his disciplines, tutoring Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, and Jurisprudence at Macquarie University between 2018 and 2020, a masters-level introductory course on deep learning at the University of Sydney, and quantum physics at UTS.
From 2018 to 2021, he was also a Research Assistant in economics, applied computational modelling, and geographic information systems at the University of Sydney, focusing on quantitative analysis of public policy. He has several years of experience as a data scientist managing analytics for national electoral campaigns in Australia, building machine learning and agent-based models of elections, and presented Deep Hierarchical Graph Convolution for Election Prediction from Geospatial Census Data at AAAI 2019.
Elija earned his PhD in Quantum Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in 2024 from the University of Technology Sydney with his thesis titled Quantum Geometric Machine Learning. He earned an Honours degree in Physics focused on quantum computation in 2017 and a Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts in Physics and Mathematics and in Economics and Philosophy in 2016 from the University of Sydney, along with a Master of Commerce in Economics and Finance in 2007.
He earned his Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice from The College of Law in 2005 and his LLB and Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Law and Communications Studies from Murdoch University in 2004.
Watch Ethical Quantum Computing: A Roadmap by Elija Perrier, QSI Seminar: Elija Perrier, UTS Centre for Quantum Software and Information, and Entangled Intelligence: Elija Perrier on Quantum AI, Risk, and the Future of Machine Learning.
Watch Computation Constraints on Algorithmic Governance. Read his Contributions at The Conversation.
Visit his Personal Homepage, LinkedIn profile, Google Scholar page, and PhilPeople profile. Follow him on GitHub and X.