Akash Wasil
Akash Wasil is a technology and national security professional with experience in research, entrepreneurship, and policy. He has worked with research groups to inform federal AI policy efforts, including recent initiatives by the Department of Commerce and the Department of Homeland Security. His work has been published or featured in outlets such as Lawfare, NeurIPS RegML, and the Atlantic Council.
Previously, Akash was an NSF-funded PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, where his research focused on developing technology-based mental health promotion programs and leveraging ML/AI to improve mental health care outcomes. Upon learning about trends in frontier AI progress, his focus shifted to technology policy & national security. He has worked on projects about US-China tech competition, scenario analysis and national security preparedness, data center security and energy needs, “grand challenge” competitions for unsolved technical research questions, and advanced semiconductor export controls.
Akash is especially passionate about tech translation: helping policymakers stay up-to-date on relevant technical insights from industry and academia. Most recently, he worked with a CA-based research group to organize briefings about AI's impact on cybersecurity. He also has experience analyzing policy-relevant work from leading industry groups, such as OpenAI’s preparedness framework and Google’s approach to model evaluations.