Ben

Ben Maltbie

MIT

Hi! I'm currently a second year master's student at MIT studying EECS and entrepreneurship. Before MIT, I worked as a software engineer at Amazon on truck/train routing algorithms and large scale optimization problems for their fleet across North America and Europe. I completed my undergrad at Georgetown University where I double majored in computer science and economics.

In the past year, I've been trying to transition into working as an AI safety researcher. My research interests are on societal impacts of AI, behavioral evaluations (particularly sycophancy), and human-AI interaction. I'm currently working on publishing the research I did through SPAR on sycophancy in large language models and how it manifests with different, complex personas. I'm also working on publishing the research I'm doing through SERC at MIT on training risk-averse AI (I focus on reward model training).

Research

Intersectional Sycophancy: How Perceived User Demographics Shape False Validation in Large Language Models
Ben Maltbie, Shivam Raval
Preprint / Under Review. 2026.
OOD Generalization of LLM Risk Aversion
Elliott Thornley, Ben Maltbie
Preprint / Under Review. 2026.
Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Competitor-Aware Customer Retention
Ben Maltbie
Preprint / Under Review. 2026.

Writing

Arguing that sycophancy, left unaddressed, could cascade into a catastrophic risk to humanity.

Experience

MIT Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) 2025 - 2026
Research Fellow
Risk-Averse AI & Training AI Utility Functions
Supervised Program for Alignment Research 2025
Research Fellow
Sycophancy & Model Organisms of Conditional Misalignment
Verizon 2025
Master Thesis
Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Competitor-Aware Customer Retention
MIT 2024 – 2026
M.S. & MBA Student
Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS), Leaders for Global Operations (LGO)
Amazon 2020 – 2024
Software Engineer
Transportation Optimization (MMPO)
Jane Street 2019
Strategy and Product Intern
Previously called Business Development
Maxlab: Laboratory for Computational Cognitive Neuroscience 2017 – 2019
Research Assistant
Leveraging Prior Concept Learning Improves Generalization From Few Examples in Computational Models of Human Object Recognition
Georgetown University 2016 – 2020
B.S. & B.A. Student
Computer Science & Economics