2026 SC Award winner Bo Li — Innovator (Executive or Practioner) of the Year

Bo Li emerged over the past year as a leading voice in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence security, combining academic research with startup innovation to address the risks posed by powerful AI systems.

As the co-founder and CEO of Virtue AI, Li works to help organizations deploy generative AI safely while protecting against emerging threats such as prompt injection, data leakage, and malicious manipulation of AI models.

Li also serves as a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where her research focuses on trustworthy machine learning, adversarial AI, and the broader challenge of building systems that remain reliable under attack.

Over the past decade, she has become widely recognized for pioneering work on adversarial machine learning—studying how attackers can exploit weaknesses in AI models and how those vulnerabilities can be mitigated.

SC Awards Judge John Taylor, CTO for Asia Pacific at Mimecast, recognized Li's many contributions to the AI security industry.

“This submission is quite impressive and demonstrates a real innovator in the cyber community,” said Taylor. “Bo Li is not only building a corporate capability but also giving back to the broader industry.”

Li launched Virtue AI in 2024 with prominent AI researchers Dawn Song, Sanmi Koyejo, and Carlos Guestrin. The company aims to translate its research into practical tools for enterprises deploying large language models (LLMs) and autonomous AI agents.

Virtue AI, recognized by Fortune as a “Cyber 60” company, develops software designed to test AI systems for vulnerabilities, monitor their behavior in production, and enforce guardrails that reduce safety and compliance risks. The approach reflects Li’s belief that AI security must be built into systems from the beginning rather than added after deployment.

Li’s career reflects a broader shift within the technology sector: as generative AI moves rapidly from research labs into real-world applications, concerns about safety, reliability, and governance have become central. By bridging academia and industry, Li has positioned herself at the forefront of efforts to make advanced AI systems not only more powerful, but also more trustworthy.