AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity

The AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity is an annual prize given by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence to recognize the positive impacts of AI to meaningfully improve, protect, and enhance human life. The award is presented annually at the AAAI conference in February. In its first two years, the associated reward was US$1 million, but has since been changed to $25000. Funding is provided by the Chinese online education company Squirrel AI.

The first recipient, in 2021, was Regina Barzilay of MIT for her work developing machine learning models to address drug synthesis and early-stage breast cancer diagnosis.