Minh Duc (David) Chu

I'm a Computer Science PhD candidate at the USC Information Sciences Institute, advised by Luca Luceri (SIGNALS Lab) and Kristina Lerman. I'm currently an Anthropic AI Safety Fellow, and this fall I'll join Character.AI as a Research Engineer Intern on the AI Safety & Alignment team.

I started at USC in 2023 and expect to defend in late 2027. Before that, I earned my B.A. with Distinction in Computer Science & Statistics from Carleton College in Minnesota.

My research sits where AI safety and alignment meet mental health. One side is behavioral, a black-box audit of how conversational AI acts over many turns, and how those interactions can compound into harm: emotional dependency, belief spirals, and eating-disorder reinforcement, especially for teens and other vulnerable users. With clinicians and social scientists, I use concrete evaluation, red-teaming harnesses, and post-training safeguards for these risks.

The other side is more fundamental, and the question I most want to answer: for AI to harm people less, to actively mitigate harm, and maybe even leave people better off, especially around emotional manipulation and mental health, it first has to understand the complex psychological and social constructs we live by, like emotions, intimacy, and mental health itself. I work toward this from several angles: mechanistic interpretability, conceptual reasoning, behavioral study, and collaboration with psychologists and psychiatrists.

I grew up in Vũng Tàu on the coast of southern Việt Nam, and now live in Los Angeles. Outside research I box and play tennis.