Donato Crisostomi

Donato Crisostomi

Incoming AI Safety Fellow @ Anthropic

Biography

Hello!

I gave up on keeping an up-to-date bio that I don’t find cringe 6 months later, so I’ll just list facts.

I am the PI of a Coefficient Giving grant on modular steering vectors, and I’ll join Anthropic for an AI Safety fellowship in July 2026.

I got my ELLIS Ph.D. from Sapienza, advised by Prof. Rodolà and co-supervised by Prof. Liò at the University of Cambridge. I was previously at Cohere, Amazon Search and Amazon Alexa.

I am interested in mech interp, weight space techniques and model merging.

You can find my papers on Scholar, and (some of) my opinions on X.

Education
  • Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2026

    ELLIS PhD @ Sapienza University & University of Cambridge

  • MS.c. in Computer Science, 2021

    Sapienza University

    110/110 with honours | GPA 30.5/31

  • BS.c. in Computer Science, 2019

    Sapienza University

    110/110 with honours | GPA 29.6/31

Experience
  • AI Safety Fellow

    Jul 2026 - Nov 2026

    Anthropic

  • Research Scholar

    Dec 2025 - Apr 2026

    Cohere

  • Applied Scientist

    Jun 2022 - Dec 2022

    Amazon Search

  • Research Scientist

    May 2021 - Oct 2021

    Amazon Alexa

News

Two papers accepted at ICML 2026! 🇰🇷 See you in Seoul!

I’ve started as a Research Scholar at Cohere! Working on Large Language Models for search and retrieval.
Attended the amazing EEML 2025 and won a best poster award! 🏅 Check it here
Mentored a great team at LOGML 2025 and helped them achieve the best project award! 🏆 Check it here 👀
Our paper “Mergenetic: a Simple Evolutionary Model Merging Library” has been accepted at ACL 2025, System Demonstration Track. Come evolve your own LLMs on Mergenetic 🧬!
Both MERGE3 and Update Your Transformer were accepted at ICML 2025 main track! 🙏
Check our new preprint MASS to see MoEs and model merging in action 💥
Audio pre-prints 🎧! Check these out to see stemmed accompaniment generation, how to generate seamless loops and activation patching for steering music generation.
The project NEXUS was awarded 1.5M€ by the Italian Fund for Science 🚀 I will be leading the Model Reuse work package!