Sunny Gandhi
Washington, D.C. / Formerly: Indiana University (Go Hoosiers!)
As Vice President of Political Affairs, Sunny led Encode’s co-sponsorship of California’s SB 1047, a landmark AI safety bill that would have required testing of advanced AI systems and created whistleblower protections. The bill passed both chambers of the state legislature with strong bipartisan margins, drawing support from an unlikely coalition including Nobel Laurate Geoffrey Hinton, Elon Musk, and Mark Ruffalo.
He also spearheaded efforts leading to the first U.S. law establishing guardrails for AI use in nuclear weapons systems, ensuring human control while enabling security benefits. At Encode, he has coordinated campaigns to authorize and fund a U.S. AI Safety Institute and advance legislation targeting AI-generated exploitation.
His technical work includes pioneering a benchmark for testing AI legal reasoning capabilities (presented at NeurIPS) and developing systems for rapid cloud deployment of AI services. He has also published research on cross-platform information analysis at AAAI. Before Encode, he served in technical roles at NASA, Deloitte, and a nuclear energy company.