Latest paper at ICML 2026
Safety-case review work is now part of the research record, alongside AgentMisalignment at ICLR 2026 and the interactive Safety AI map.
Explore Safety AIai transformation + safety
Deploy AI safely.
Build trusted agents.
I help boards and frontier teams turn agentic AI into real operating systems, with evaluations, safety cases, and governance designed before scale.
Group CTO & Chief AI Officer @ Cape.io. AI Safety Researcher at Cambridge AI Safety Hub & Arcadia Impact. Author of Autonomous Minds. Latest safety-case paper at ICML 2026 and co-author of AgentMisalignment (ICLR 2026).
current proof
Where the AI work is showing up now
MIT xPRO lessons on agentic AI
Teaching executives how to move from AI pilots to operating-model redesign: the dishwasher principle, delegation rules, and 90-day plans.
See speaking workCDO Day, AI World Congress, and XFutures
Recent talks in Madrid and London are now complete. The next public stop is XFutures, focused on the future of AI and leadership.
Visit XFuturesAI-driven software delivery at Cape.io
The practical frontier is not just better coding assistants; it is specifying, delegating, verifying, and governing agentic engineering.
Read field noteslive
what are you working on right now?
what makes your work different?
most underrated AI-safety finding right now?
selected work
Papers & books
Lessons from External Review of DeepMind's Scheming Inability Safety Case
External review of DeepMind's public scheming-inability safety case for Gemini 2.5, applying the Assurance 2.0 / Claims-Argument-Evidence methodology. Translates the review into recommendations for AI developers, AISIs and regulators on how frontier safety cases should be structured to support external scrutiny.
AgentMisalignment: Measuring the Propensity for Misaligned Behaviour in LLM-Based Agents
A propensity benchmark covering shutdown resistance, oversight evasion, sandbagging and power-seeking on frontier models. Key finding: persona system prompts shift misalignment more than the choice of model itself, with direct implications for how enterprises configure deployed agents.
Autonomous Minds
How agentic AI predicts and learns to enable productivity and empowerment. Governance patterns and human-machine collaboration models for the next decade.
Grow Your Business with AI
A practical blueprint for executives scaling AI responsibly across the enterprise — from strategy to production deployment.
speaking
Talks & conferences
- Oct 22-24, 2026 Speaker — XFutures Summit Madrid, Spain upcoming
- Jun 23-24, 2026 Agentic AI — AI World Congress London, UK past
- May 13, 2026 Speaker — Chief Data Officer Day Madrid, Spain · Estadio Atlético de Madrid past
- Apr 15, 2026 AI Trends 2026 — keynote and panel — IAB Chile Santiago, Chile past
- Oct 01, 2025 Agentic AI Masterclass — Ecosystems2030 A Coruña, Spain past
- Nov 30, 2024 Speaker — AI & Big Data Expo Global London, UK past
- May 30, 2024 Speaker — AI World Congress 2024 London, UK past
about
Bio
Francisco Javier Campos Zabala has spent 25+ years building and scaling AI, data, and platform organisations across AdTech, FinTech, and SaaS — at Group CTO and CIO level inside Cape.io, Fenestra, Experian, Kantar, GroupM, and Havas. He sits at the intersection of enterprise AI and frontier safety: as Group CTO and Chief AI Officer at Cape.io he is designing one of the first fully agentic-driven creative AdTech organisations on Claude, GPT, and Codex; as a researcher at the Cambridge AI Safety Hub and the Arcadia Impact AI Governance Taskforce he co-authors work on agent misalignment and frontier safety-case review. Author of Autonomous Minds (Wiley) and Grow Your Business with AI (Springer). Advisor to the Bank of England, FCA, and the EU AI Act.
writing
Popular field notes from LinkedIn
The cost constraint I failed to pass to my engineering team
I told my engineering team to spawn parallel subagents. I left out the cost, which was printed in the same document. The document was Anthropic’s post on building multi-agent systems. I carried across the exciting line: parallel agents can cover more ground than a single agent working within its context limits. I did not carry...
Why local AI hardware may outlast the model moat
Everyone mocked Apple for losing the AI race. It may be the only company whose AI position survives the next two years. From a first-principles perspective, three things stand out: no frontier model moat has survived for long, unified memory changes the economics of local AI, and open models are narrowing the gap to the...
A guardrail that refuses safety work becomes an outage
I gave Claude Fable 5 a full week as my daily driver. By Friday I was pricing the switch to OpenAI, and the refusal that pushed me there had nothing to do with safety. From a first-principles perspective, alignment is a control mechanism, a steering wheel. I got a locked door. I asked it to...
The old moat was the model. The new moat is the loop.
The era of “pick the best model and win” is officially over. I watched a room of global AI leaders bury it in London. At AI World Congress, every hallway conversation circled the same conclusion: the model was never the moat. The advantage sits in what you build around it. Everyone rents the same frontier...
The new battleground is the harness and the eval loop
The era of the bigger model is officially dead. The new battleground is the harness. A coding agent is a stochastic generator wrapped in a verifier. The model proposes. The harness disposes. The harness is only as honest as the eval set behind it. A model output is a hypothesis. Without a ground-truth check -...
What survives when AI starts improving itself?
What survives when AI starts improving itself? That was the sharpest question at MIT xPRO’s AI for Senior Executives cohort, where the room was past the “should we adopt AI” debate. They were asking what compounds for them specifically once the model layer starts compounding for everyone. Three layers sit above the model: proprietary data,...
contact
For conversations on implementing agentic systems at scale within the enterprise safely and frontier safety-case review — get in touch.