Sahar Abdelnabi

Sahar Abdelnabi

Principal Investigator at ELLIS Institute Tübingen & MPI-IS
Independent Research Group Leader · Tübingen, Germany

COMPASS Research Group

COoperative Machine intelligence for People-Aligned Safe Systems

Developing safe, aligned, and steerable AI agents, with an emphasis on security, human aspects, and cooperative multi-agent systems.

About

I lead the COMPASS research group at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen, the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, and the Tübingen AI Center. I am an ELLIS member, a faculty member of IMPRS-IS, and an associated faculty member of the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems.

Previously, I was an AI security researcher at Microsoft (Security Response Center, Microsoft Research Cambridge). I completed my PhD at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, advised by Prof. Dr. Mario Fritz.

News

Research

I work on the broad intersection of AI, AGI, and multi-agent systems with security, safety, and sociopolitical aspects:

  1. Understanding, probing, and evaluating the failure modes of AI models — their biases, emergent risks, and misuse scenarios.
  2. Designing mitigations — system defenses, white-box control methods, reasoning enhancements, and novel architectures to counter such risks.
  3. Leveraging AI agents for good — scientific discovery and advancing our society.
AI Security A(G)I Safety & Alignment Prompt Injection Multi-agent Safety Cooperative AI Evaluation & Situational Awareness Contextual Integrity & Privacy AI & Society

Background