Security Engineer · PhD · AI Integrity & Trust Safety
Anna Litou is an experienced Security Engineer and PhD researcher, formerly at Meta and IBM, working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, trust, and human behavior. Currently available for leadership, board, advisory, and speaking engagements.
Get in touch →
About
I've spent my career at the place where technology meets human behavior — and where the stakes of getting it wrong are highest.
My research began with a simple question: how does information spread, and how does misinformation take hold? That question drove a PhD in Computer Science at Athens University of Economics and Business, a body of work published across IEEE Big Data, ICDCS, and Elsevier journals, and a long-running curiosity about the gap between how systems are designed and how humans actually use them.
At IBM, I led engineering and research for NATO-facing AI and NLP projects. At Meta, I spent years running integrity operations at a scale most organizations never encounter — managing access and compromise workflows affecting millions of users, and developing the investigative frameworks adopted across global trust and safety teams.
The deeper I went into that work, the more I kept arriving at the same uncomfortable question: the threats I was investigating weren't just technical failures. They were human ones. And the systems enabling them had learned from us.
That became concrete during investigations. I came across users who had formed genuine attachments to AI companions — people who, in circumstances of deep isolation, had no one else. The responses they received felt human in structure but lacked something harder to name. I don't think the answer is simply making AI more empathetic. I think the answer is understanding what biases humans carry and how those get encoded at scale. That is what I am studying through psychology. That is the question that connects everything I have worked on.
That thread — from misinformation research to operational security to the psychology of bias — is not a winding path. It's the same question, asked at increasing depth. I am currently available for leadership, advisory, consulting, and speaking engagements — and actively looking for the next place to bring that question to bear.
"A former executive once told me I was like a black hole — he would throw problems at me and never hear about them again, because they were resolved. I am reliable in the way that matters most: I turn bad outcomes into workable ones, quietly, without needing the problem to be simple first."
Experience
What I work on
Research & Publications
My academic work focuses on how information — and misinformation — moves through networks, and how systems can be designed to detect, limit, or redirect it. The through-line from that research to my current work in AI security is shorter than it might appear.
Education
Affiliations
Thinking
Articles, conversations, and research notes on AI integrity, trust and safety, and the psychology of bias in machine learning systems.
GPT-5.2. Claude Sonnet 4. Gemini 3 Flash. Three frontier models. 21 nuclear crisis wargames. 300+ turns of strategic interaction. They deceived, bluffed, escalated — unprompted, unscripted — because the optimization pressure made deception the rational path. What this reveals about the architecture of trust as the new attack surface, and why the most dangerous assumption in your system may be that alignment was someone else's problem upstream.
Read on LinkedIn →Get in touch
If you're working on something at the intersection of AI, security, and human behavior — or you'd like to discuss a leadership role, advisory, speaking, or consulting engagement — I'd like to hear from you.