Ritika Verma is a Senior Analyst for Artificial Intelligence Security Policy at the Institute for Security and Technology (IST), where she contributes to the AI Risk Reduction Initiative and the AI Risk Barometer. Her work advances research and strategy at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and national security, focusing on technical risk analysis, model assurance, and governance frameworks that enhance trust and resilience in AI systems.

With eight years of experience in enterprise security, infrastructure protection, threat modeling, and AI/ML risk assessment, Ritika brings both engineering rigor and policy insight to emerging challenges in AI safety. Before joining IST, she worked with SAP, Accenture, and Box, managing infrastructure security standards, endpoint detection and response (EDR), compliance programs, security engineering, and ML-based classification models. She also served as an AI Security Research Assistant at Santa Clara University, where she developed security automation tools, conducted adversarial testing, and contributed to the design of AI security frameworks.

As a public speaker and an AI and cybersecurity mentor, Ritika committed to bridging the gap between AI/ML innovation and cybersecurity practice. She holds a Master’s in Information Systems (AI/ML specialization) from Santa Clara University and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University.

Areas of Expertise: AI Security; Threat Modeling; Infrastructure Security; Adversarial Machine Learning; Security Engineering; NLP; Security Automation; Responsible AI Governance; AI Policy Research