The center was founded in 2016 by a group of academics led by Berkeley computer science professor and AI expert Stuart J.

CHAI's faculty membership includes Russell, Pieter Abbeel and Anca Dragan from Berkeley, Bart Selman and Joseph Halpern from Cornell,[3] Michael Wellman and Satinder Singh Baveja from the University of Michigan, and Tom Griffiths and Tania Lombrozo from Princeton.

[4] In 2016, the Open Philanthropy Project (OpenPhil) recommended that Good Ventures provide CHAI support of $5,555,550 over five years.

[5] CHAI has since received additional grants from OpenPhil and Good Ventures of over $12,000,000, including for collaborations with the World Economic Forum and Global AI Council.

[9] It has also worked on modeling human-machine interaction in scenarios where intelligent machines have an "off-switch" that they are capable of overriding.