Security + AI + Agents + MCP
Tobin is the VP of AI Agents at WorkOS building enterprise-ready AI agents and a research fellow at Stanford University leading research for the Safe and Useful AI Agents initiative in HAI. Tobin completed his PhD at MIT in 2025 on "Private, Verifiable, and Auditable AI Systems", where he was a senior fellow with the E14 VC fund. Tobin was an Australian-American Fulbright Future Scholar for his time at MIT, a Pivotal Fellowship mentor, and an author of the 2025 International AI Safety Report.
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.
News Stories & Talks
Forbes
AI Agents: Your Digital Defender
TEDx Boston
Reimagining security for AI
MIT Tech Review
What is vibe coding, exactly?
MIT News
Privacy and Personhood online with future AI
BBC Radio Interview
Can we keep AI out of human only spaces?
MIT Media Lab Interview
My life at MIT
Adelaide Alumni Interview
A journey to MIT
The Advertiser
Southern Star
Seminar Talk
The Future of Data Science with LLMs
New York Times
AI Data Restrictions
Life Updates
- 2025, May 🔐 Started a new role as VP of AI Agents 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 on Loyal AI 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. 🚗