Rishav Punatar

AI Safety · Evaluation · Public Communication

Rishav Punatar

AI safety practitioner with a humanities background, working at the intersection of frontier model evaluation, child safety policy, and public communication. I lead the UK government's first national safety benchmark for AI systems used by children, and translate technical safety findings for everyone from Secretaries of State to classroom teachers and the national press.

Rishav Punatar smiling in a sunlit garden, wearing a black zip-neck knit
Technical Program Manager, Safety Evaluations — i.AI, London

Experience

Mar 2025 – Present London

Government Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI)

Technical Program Manager, Safety Evaluations

No. 10-founded AI start-up transforming UK public services

  • Lead the Sovereign Education Benchmark, the UK's first national safety evaluation of AI tutoring systems used by children — owned end to end, from pitching the Prime Minister's AI Adviser to technical delivery.
  • Built a novel harm taxonomy for child-AI interactions grounded in KCSIE statutory guidance and the Online Safety Act, translating safeguarding frameworks into evaluation criteria a machine-learning team can implement.
  • Designed and ran adversarial evaluations using Anthropic's Petri and Bloom frameworks and AISI's Inspect — thousands of synthetic multi-turn scenarios across child-safety risks — and built an LLM-as-judge adjudication pipeline calibrated against 100+ expert human annotators.
  • Work across the AI Safety Institute, the Department for Education, frontier labs (Anthropic, Google DeepMind) and civil society (NSPCC, Internet Watch Foundation, 5Rights, the Children's Commissioner's Office).

Oct 2020 – Feb 2025 London

Publicis Sapient

Agile Programme Manager, CoreAI

  • Delivered a £40m generative AI platform across three continents; built AI governance frameworks covering model testing, bias detection and drift monitoring, aligned to the EU AI Act and NIST standards.
  • Product Manager, Lloyds Bank (2020–2022): B2B API marketplace spanning 500+ APIs.

Research & Fellowships

2026

“Activation Oracles Improve Deception Detection”

Capstone research paper on interpretability-based methods for detecting model deception. With Kai Rawal, Zach Yahn and Ishan Kavathekar; mentored by Lorenzo Pacchiardi.

2026

International Programme on AI Evaluation, ValgrAI

Inaugural cohort of the world's first academic programme dedicated to AI evaluation; 40 participants selected globally.

2026

AI Policy Fellow, Imperial College London

Research and writing at the boundary between technical AI systems and the policymakers who legislate for them.

2025

BlueDot Impact, Technical AI Safety

Independent red-teaming and interpretability work.

Education

2024

University of Oxford, Saïd Business School

Artificial Intelligence Programme (Merit).

2016–2020

University of Warwick

BA Politics, Philosophy & Economics · year abroad at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Selected Builds

Contact

rishavpunatar@gmail.com

London, United Kingdom