Riana Pfefferkorn is a policy fellow at Stanford HAI. A lawyer by training, Riana researches the law and policy implications of emerging technologies including AI. Her research spans topics in privacy and civil liberties, encryption policy, digital surveillance, cybersecurity, and online trust and safety. Her past work includes analyzing the legal implications and real-world impact of AI-generated child abuse material, predicting the impact of “deepfakes” on evidentiary proceedings in court, studying the system for reporting child exploitation online, and surveying online platforms’ use of “content-oblivious” trust and safety techniques, among other topics. Along with her HAI colleague Dr. Jennifer King, Riana is a 2026-2027 Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Riana has trained congressional staffers and state-court judges on AI-related issues, testified to a committee of the Australian Parliament, and spoken at various legal and cybersecurity conferences, including Black Hat and DEF CON’s Crypto & Privacy Village. She appears frequently in the press, including the Washington Post, CNN, and NPR, and has written for publications including the New York Times, Scientific American, the Boston Review, Brookings, Lawfare, Tech Policy Press, and Just Security. A list of additional publications and other work product is available here.
Before joining HAI in the summer of 2024, Riana was a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and before that, the Associate Director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, where she remains an affiliate (and occasionally blogs). Prior to joining Stanford in 2015, Riana was an associate in the Internet Strategy & Litigation group at the law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and a law clerk to the Honorable Bruce J. McGiverin of the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico. During law school, she interned for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Riana is a graduate of the University of Washington School of Law and Whitman College, and a member of the California and Washington State bars.
