G'day, I'm Tobin

[email protected]
Tobin South - AI researcher and Head of AI Agents at WorkOS, Stanford research fellow

AI Agents + MCP + Security

Tobin leads AI Agents at WorkOS, building security tools for MCP & AI, and is a research fellow at Stanford University, leading research for the Loyal Agents initiative in HAI. Tobin completed his PhD at MIT in 2025 on "Private, Verifiable, and Auditable AI Systems", where he was an Australian-American Fulbright Scholar and a senior fellow with the E14 VC fund. Tobin has been a mentor and advisor across a range of fellowships and institutes, including Pivotal Research, Cambridge ERA, and the Oxford IDAI from the Cosmos Institute. Tobin was an author of the 2025 International AI Safety Report and has research spanning AI security, technical governance, and policy.

About Me: I'm a recovering mega-nerd who was Valedictorian of my undergraduate where I studied Mathematics and Computer Science; a first-time startup founder (which failed, great learning experience!); and a guy who liked running a bit much. My hobbies include swing dancing (usually in Golden Gate Park), organizing an annual Davos AI Safety event, and finding the best coffee in whatever city I'm in. Before all that, I grew up in the "Peanut capital of Australia", the agricultural town of Kingaroy, Queensland; but I consider Adelaide my real home. Don't hesitate to reach out if you have something interesting to talk about.

Tobin South moderating AI safety panel discussion at academic conference
Tobin South presenting on AI security and privacy at tech conference

News Stories & Talks

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Life Updates

  • 2025, July Spoke at the United Nations AI for Good on AI Agents Safety & helped launch new MCP security products.
  • 2025, May 🔐 Started a new role as Head of AI Agents & MCP at WorkOS.
  • 2025, April 🎓 Defended & graduated my PhD titled "Private, Verifiable, and Auditable AI Systems" from MIT. Went swing dancing to live jazz in the Guggenheim to celebrate.
  • 2025, Jan Moved to SF and started a new initiative at 🌲 Stanford called Loyal Agents. Living temporarily in a 🏚️ 👨‍💻 Bohemian hacker-artist warehouse called Langton Labs.
  • 2025, Jan Ran an AI agents & security workshop in Davos alongside the World Economic Forum 🏔️. Co-authored the International AI Safety Report 2025 as lead of the Risks to Privacy and Methods for Privacy sections.
  • 2024, Dec Presented two papers at NeurIPS 2024.
  • 2024, Aug Contributed to a large project on personhood credentials with collaborators from OpenAI, Microsoft, and OpenMined.
  • 2024, June Went paragliding through the Alps in the south of France 🪂 and played with some falcons 🦅 at an Irish castle.
  • 2024, May Gave a TEDx talk at TEDx Boston on AI Security.
  • 2024, April Ran 🏃‍♂️ a whole marathon on my birthday for no clear reason.
  • 2024, Jan Presented at Davos on privacy, security, and LLMs.
  • 2024, Jan Contributed to the Singapore M3S program engaging with AI policy. Ate a lot of hawker food and ran 20km around the city.
  • 2023, Dec Awarded an MIT Generative AI grant to research end-to-end privacy for generative AI.
  • 2023, Summer Interned at Microsoft Research in the Cryptography and Plurality teams. Lived on a houseboat while I was there.
  • 2023, Oct Downloaded the whole internet as part of the new Data Provenance initiative work for transparency in pretraining data.
  • 2023, June Started a fellowship with the E14 VC Fund focusing on AI investments.
  • 2023, Jan 🏃 Ran a marathon in LA with my friends and then took a road trip in a Tesla around the West Coast. 🚗