Hendrycks' research focuses on topics that include
machine learning safety,
machine ethics, and robustness. He credits his participation in the
effective altruism (EA) movement-linked
80,000 Hours program for his career focus towards AI safety, though denies being an advocate for EA. and of the paper that introduced the language model benchmark
MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) in 2020. In February 2022, Hendrycks co-authored recommendations for the US
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to inform the management of risks from
artificial intelligence. In September 2022, Hendrycks wrote a paper providing a framework for analyzing the impact of AI research on societal risks. He later published a paper in March 2023 examining how
natural selection and competitive pressures could shape the goals of
artificial agents. This was followed by "An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks", which discusses four categories of risks: malicious use, AI race dynamics, organizational risks, and rogue AI agents. Hendrycks is the safety adviser of
xAI, an AI startup company founded by
Elon Musk in 2023. To avoid any potential conflicts of interest, he receives a symbolic
one-dollar salary and holds no company equity. In November 2024, he also joined
Scale AI as an advisor collecting a one-dollar salary. Hendrycks is the creator of
Humanity's Last Exam, a benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of
large language models, which he developed in collaboration with Scale AI. In 2024, Hendrycks published the textbook
Introduction to AI Safety, Ethics, and Society, based on courseware he had previously developed. == Selected publications ==