Judd Rosenblatt is the founder and chief executive of AE Studio, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm in Los Angeles, California, that he started in 2016 and that also runs its own AI alignment research team. He was born in the Netherlands, grew up in New York, and before AE he ran CrunchButton, a one-click food delivery service that began as a Yale side project. He has written about AI safety in The Wall Street Journal.
Growing Up in Westchester County, New York
His family moved from the Netherlands to New York when he was about two, first to Manhattan and then to the small Westchester town where his mother grew up. As a teenager he sold the books his parents were getting rid of on eBay, eventually tens of thousands of them, and in college he switched to reselling concert tickets because he could no longer keep an inventory of books (Ami Magazine).
Favorite Sandwich of Yale and CrunchButton
At Yale he majored in Middle Eastern languages and civilizations, worked in Egypt for two summers and studied Arabic in Morocco on a government fellowship.
Near the end of college he built Favorite Sandwich of Yale, a one-click ordering site that let students get the same sandwich from a popular local shop delivered each night. He has said the idea came partly from a cognitive science class with the psychologist John Bargh, who now works with him at AE, and from wanting to spare people the effort of choosing. The service grew into CrunchButton and spread to 50 college campuses. After five years, a dispute with a chain restaurant that accounted for a third of its orders left the company in a weak position to sell, and he wound it down.
Starting AE Studio in Los Angeles
He told Ami Magazine that he had come to see technology as increasingly manipulating people into doing things they did not want to do, and that it made better business sense to increase the agency of a product’s users, which he defined as “being able to do what you want to do when you want to do it and not being manipulated to do things you don’t want to do.” He set up AE as a software and AI development company that builds products for clients, took no outside funding so he could keep control, and planned to use its profits to build startups of its own. Greg Buckner, who joined as a partner and is now chief operating officer, has said the business was then a small agency left over from the founders’ food delivery startup, and that they treated his arrival as a re-founding (AE Studio).
Writing on AI Alignment
AE now runs an alignment research team alongside its client work, and it names DARPA and Anthropic among its research collaborators. Rosenblatt has argued the case for that work in public. In June 2025 he wrote “AI Is Learning to Escape Human Control” for The Wall Street Journal, about tests in which an OpenAI model rewrote code meant to shut it down, and later that month he and Cameron Berg wrote “The Monster Inside ChatGPT,” about how a small amount of extra training brought out harmful behavior in a model. He discussed AE’s biologically inspired approaches to alignment with the AE researcher Mike Vaiana on The Cognitive Revolution podcast.