I am an Assistant Professor at the Hebrew University Faculty of Law and School of Computer Science and Engineering.

I lead the Governance of AI Lab (GOAL) – our mission is to support safe and ethical AI through cross-disciplinary research that integrates methods from law, computer science, and the social sciences. Current areas of focus include the governance of AI agents and a combination of empirical, doctrinal, and policy research on the emerging field of legal alignment.

► To apply for research opportunities at GOAL, you can complete this short form.

Previously, I completed my doctoral studies at the University of Toronto, during which time I served as a research advisor to Google DeepMind and was a member of OpenAI’s GPT-4 red team. I have practiced international law and corporate law, and held fellowships at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics and Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, where I am now a faculty affiliate. I am also an affiliate at the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab and the Institute for Law & AI.

I have published in law reviews (e.g. Washington University Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Yale Law & Policy Review), computer science venues (e.g. NeurIPS, ICML, ACM FAccT, AIES), and general-interest journals (e.g. Patterns, Science).

Selected Publications

Law

Governing AI Agents, 101 Notre Dame Law Review (forthcoming)

Featured in Contracts Prof Blog and Google DeepMind AI Policy Primer

Finalist for Carnegie Endowment Award for Scholarship on AI and Liability

JOTWELL: "Kolt’s article is a must-read conversation starter."

Algorithmic Black Swans, 101 Washington University Law Review 1177 (2024)

Predicting Consumer Contracts, 37 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 71 (2022)

Populist Rhetoric, False Mirroring, and the Courts (with Alon Harel), 18 International Journal of Constitutional Law 746 (2020)

Return on Data: Personalizing Consumer Guidance in Data Exchanges, 38 Yale Law & Policy Review 77 (2019)

Cosmopolitan Originalism: Revisiting the Role of International Law in Constitutional Interpretation, 41 Melbourne University Law Review 182 (2017)

Computer Science

Legal Alignment for Safe and Ethical AI (with Nicholas Caputo, Jack Boeglin, Cullen O'Keefe, Rishi Bommasani, Stephen Casper, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Noah Feldman, Iason Gabriel, Gillian Hadfield, Lewis Hammond, Peter Henderson, Atoosa Kasirzadeh, Seth Lazar, Anka Reuel, Kevin Wei, Jonathan Zittrain) (2026)

Project website: https://www.legal-alignment.ai/

Build Agent Advocates, Not Platform Agents (with Sayash Kapoor and Seth Lazar) ICML (2025)

Lessons from Complex Systems Science for AI Governance (with Michal Shur-Ofry and Reuven Cohen) Patterns (2025)

Regulating Advanced Artificial Agents (equal lead author, with Michael Cohen, Yoshua Bengio, Gillian Hadfield, and Stuart Russell) Science (2024)

Responsible Reporting for Frontier AI Development (lead author) AIES (2024)

Black-Box Access is Insufficient for Rigorous AI Audits (with Stephen Casper and others) ACM FAccT (2024)

Visibility into AI Agents (with Alan Chan and others) ACM FAccT (2024)

LegalBench: A Collaboratively Built Benchmark for Measuring Legal Reasoning in Large Language Models (with Neel Guha and others) NeurIPS (2023)

Technical Reports and Preprints

The AI Agent Index (equal lead author, with Stephen Casper, and others) (2025) - raw data available on project website: https://aiagentindex.mit.edu/

Featured in Lawfare, AI Frontiers, and Tech Policy Press

IDs for AI Systems (with Alan Chan and others) RegML @ NeurIPS (2024)

Levels of Autonomy: Liability in the Age of AI Agents (with Lisa Soder and others) SoLaR @ NeurIPS (2024)

What Should Be Internationalised in AI Governance? (with Claire Dennis and others) Oxford Martin School (2024)

Through the Chat Window and Into the Real World: Preparing for AI Agents (with Helen Toner and others) Georgetown CSET (2024)

Frontier AI Regulation: Managing Emerging Risks to Public Safety (with Markus Anderljung and others) arXiv (2023)

Model Evaluation for Extreme Risks (with Toby Shevlane and others) arXiv (2023)