Anik Sahai

Anik Sahai is an AI and neuroscience researcher, builder, and co-founder of the Ethics Lab. His work focuses on artificial intelligence, robotics, and the growing relationship between people and intelligent systems. He has worked on projects ranging from embodied AI and autonomous navigation to medical AI, including building a self-driving golf cart, working with fruit flies and their recovery mechanisms, developing AI systems for healthcare, and conducting research on how humans interact with and respond to AI.

Working so closely with AI is also what pushed Anik to think more seriously about its consequences. The more capable these systems became, the more he realized that understanding how to build AI was only half of the problem. Students were beginning to use tools that could write, reason, research, and increasingly make decisions for them, often without ever being taught how those systems worked, where they failed, what happened to their data, or when relying on AI could actually weaken their own thinking.

That gap helped inspire him to co-found the Ethics Lab. Rather than treating AI ethics as a distant debate about hypothetical future machines, Anik wanted to make it practical for the generation already growing up with AI. Through the Ethics Lab, he works with students and schools to explore questions surrounding AI literacy, privacy, bias, misinformation, cognitive offloading, responsible AI use, and what it means to preserve human judgment in a world where increasingly capable systems are always available.

His perspective comes from being both an advocate for AI and someone who spends a significant amount of time seeing its limitations firsthand. He believes students should absolutely learn to use AI, but they should also understand what they are handing over when they use it. The goal of the Ethics Lab is therefore not to teach students that AI is inherently good or bad, but to give them enough technical understanding and critical-thinking ability to make those decisions themselves.

Outside of the Ethics Lab, Anik continues to conduct research at the intersection of AI, robotics, neuroscience, and human-machine interaction. He is particularly interested in embodied AI: systems that must perceive, reason about, and act within the physical world. His work has included autonomous robots navigating complex indoor environments, vision-language models for robotic decision-making, AI safety systems, and neuroscience research. Across those projects, one question continues to connect his technical work with the Ethics Lab: as machines become capable of doing more of our thinking and acting for us, what should we make sure humans never stop doing for themselves?