Team
A dedicated, mission-aligned group of technical, legal, economics, and AI safety researchers and advisors, convened to translate research into timely memos for policymakers
Core team
Lucas Irwin
Project Lead
Author of Position: Token Taxes Can Mitigate AI's Economic Risks (ICML 2026). He is currently a DPhil student at the University of Oxford and the Oxford Martin School AI Governance Initiative (AIGI). He holds a bachelor's in Computer Science from Princeton University, was a summer fellow at the Centre for AI Governance, and has had his work featured in Bloomberg and Just Security.
Simone Gargiulo
Technical Governance Researcher
Conducts research on technical AI governance, with a focus on whether physical and hardware-based measurements can help verify AI compute and distinguish different types of LLM activity. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Pivotal Research, and previously worked at CERN and EPFL, where he completed his PhD in physics. He later contributed to the ESA Galileo programme, working on atomic-clock technology used in Europe’s global navigation satellite system.
Shahil Goodka
Legal Researcher
A technology lawyer from London, most recently an Associate in RPC LLP’s leading commercial and technology practice. He was previously a secondee in Meta’s legal team, advising on global cybersecurity incidents and data governance. Shahil now collaborates on policy research as a SPAR Research Fellow and advises AI safety non-profits.
Saskia Poulter
Economics Researcher
A DPhil student at Nuffield College, Oxford, where she works on the political economy of housing. Aside from her degree, she is a policy analyst at several UK think tanks and consultancies, focussing primarily on growth policy. She holds the ESRC’s Advanced Quantitative Methods studentship.
Akansh Jain
Technical Researcher
Has built his career building systems from scratch across big tech in e-commerce, marketplaces, and finance. He brings an implementer’s view to the token taxes project, which sits at the intersection of his work on climate tech, Global South alignment, and AI safety through an Apart Research initiated project.
Advisors
Professor Philip H.S Torr, FRS, FREng
Advisor
Professor Torr is a British scientist and a professor at the University of Oxford. His research interests are in machine learning and computer vision and he is a fellow of the Royal Society, fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, and distinguished research fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford.
Sharif Kazemi
Advisor
Sharif is a MATS Research Fellow working on AI assurance and verification. Previously, he was Policy and Strategy Lead at the World Bank’s applied AI lab, advising governments on operationalising national AI strategies. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.
Andrei Potlogea
Advisor
A Lecturer in Economics at the University of Edinburgh. Originally a trade economist, he now works on the economics of AI. He contributed to Epoch AI’s GATE project, an early integrated assessment model of the AI transition, and his current research examines the economic impact of AI regulation.
Get in touch
Whether you are interested in funding us or working on research related to taxing AI, we would like to hear from you.
thetokentaxproject@outlook.com