David Veldran
David Veldran is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, a Summer Fellow at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS), and a Researcher at the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS). His work sits at the intersection of moral philosophy and the governance of artificial intelligence, with a focus on the long-term opportunities and risks of AI and other emerging technologies.
Since June 2026, David has served as a Summer Fellow in Washington, DC as part of the 2026 AI Policy Fellowship cohort at IAPS, a nonpartisan think tank that produces policy research to address the implications of AI, from today’s most advanced models to potential AGI and superintelligence.
At OPIS, a think-and-do tank dedicated to a more compassionate world that advocates for making the prevention of intense suffering, in humans and animals alike, a primary ethical objective of institutional decision-making, he coauthored — with our Jonathan Leighton, the organization’s Executive Director — the 2026 working paper The Moral Blind Spot in AI Governance: Risks of Large-Scale Suffering, which argues that the risk of large-scale intense suffering is a moral blind spot that AI governance has largely overlooked.
Spanning AI safety, s-risk, machine ethics, and value alignment, the paper identifies three broad categories of risk — human misuse of AI, uncontrolled misaligned AI, and uncontrolled AI aligned with flawed values — and recommends prioritizing suffering prevention, assessing AI’s impacts on suffering, ensuring responsible human control over advanced systems, and pursuing international cooperation centered on compassionate values.
David is also part of the team at the Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS), a research nonprofit whose mission is to reduce severe suffering, taking all sentient beings into account, and whose work focuses on suffering-focused ethics, s-risks (scenarios of astronomical-scale suffering), and cause prioritization. His interests at CRS include well-being, longtermism, space colonisation, and the ethics of AI and emerging technologies.
At the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Philosophy, which he joined in 2024, David specializes in ethics and political philosophy. His research centers on moral philosophy, normative ethics, and metaethics — with particular interests in welfare, fairness, consequentialism, constructivism, and moral disagreement — alongside secondary interests in political philosophy and philosophy of mind, and his areas of specialization include normative ethics and value theory.
In 2026, he published The Hinges of “On Certainty”, a paper engaging Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, in the philosophy journal Theoria; the paper is indexed on PhilPapers.
From June 2023 to July 2024, David was a Research Assistant at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington, DC-based public policy think tank, where he assisted Senior Fellows Brent Orrell and Sally Satel, M.D., with research and writing on workforce development, AI’s impact on the labor market and society, economic mobility, addiction, and mental health.
With Orrell, he coauthored the 2024 AEI report The Age of Uncertainty—and Opportunity: Work in the Age of AI, which reviews more than a decade of research on AI’s labor-market effects and argues that students and incumbent workers should develop balanced skill “portfolios” that support flexibility and adaptation amid technological uncertainty.
His further collaborations with Orrell include Here’s a Kind of Job-Training Program That Works in The Bulwark, on the strong track record of sector-based job-training programs such as Year Up and Per Scholas, Vocation: A Cure for Burnout, originally published by Adam Smith Works, and A Pro-Market and Pro-Social Economy, a review essay at Econlib.
David earned his Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Princeton University in 2023 and began his doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh in 2024. Deepening his focus on transformative AI, he completed the AI Safety, Ethics, and Society course from the Center for AI Safety, a San Francisco-based nonprofit working to reduce societal-scale risks from AI, and the AGI Strategy course from BlueDot Impact, a nonprofit talent accelerator focused on beneficial AI, both in 2025.
Based in Washington, DC, David is interested in history, politics, sports, and music, and enjoys running, hiking, cooking, and traveling. Read his Contributions at Econlib and Contributions at Adam Smith Works.
Visit his LinkedIn profile, PhilPeople profile, and University of Pittsburgh Department of Philosophy page.