Johannes Himmelreich is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Administration and International Affairs at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, a Senior Research Associate in the Campbell Public Affairs Institute, and affiliated faculty in the iSchool and the philosophy department. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Prior to joining Syracuse, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Humboldt University Berlin and at Stanford University's McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. During his time in Silicon Valley, he consulted on tech ethics for two Fortune 500 companies and worked on the ethics of autonomous systems at Apple.
Himmelreich works on AI ethics, AI governance, political philosophy, and philosophy of science. His research examines how democratic institutions should govern AI—particularly the role of bureaucracy, the limits of "ground truth" in machine learning classification, and the evaluation of moral reasoning in large language models. He is also interested in using AI to do better philosophy, and is developing a tool that is available at https://philosophy.reviews/ and as a plugin at https://github.com/AI-4-Phi/PhilLit.
He is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of AI Governance and is writing a book on constitutional governance in algorithmic administration. He has published in Philosophy of Science, Communications of the ACM, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, and AI & Society, among others.
Himmelreich, Johannes. “Against ‘Democratizing AI.’” AI & SOCIETY 38 (2023): 1333–46.
Zhang, Baobao, Diane Coyle, Jae Yeon Kim, Johannes Himmelreich, and Mila Gascó-Hernandez. “AI, the Public Sector, and Policymaking.” Preprint, Politics and International Relations, May 5, 2026.
Himmelreich, Johannes. “Democracy and the AI-Augmented Administrative State.” In Democracy’s Mega Challenges: Climate Change, Migration, and Artificial Intelligence, edited by Anthony M. Messina and Belen Fernandez Milmanda. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.
Himmelreich, Johannes. “How Utilitarian Are OpenAI’s Models Really? Replicating and Reinterpreting Pfeffer, Krügel, and Uhl (2025).” arXiv:2603.22730. Preprint, arXiv, March 24, 2026.
Himmelreich, Johannes. “Should We Automate Democracy?” In The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics, edited by Carissa Véliz. Oxford University Press, 2023.
Himmelreich, Johannes, Arbie Hsu, Ellen Veomett, and Kristian Lum. “The Intersectionality Problem for Algorithmic Fairness.” Proceedings of the Algorithmic Fairness Through the Lens of Metrics and Evaluation, May 11, 2025, 68–95.
