About the lab
Hassana Labs is an independent non-profit AI research lab. We write our papers with fellows and contributors from around the world, and most of our tools are open source.
Why Hassana
My grandma never went to high school, but she taught me that learning has no gates.
Hassana Labs is named after our founder’s grandmother. She loved learning, taught him mathematics, and made everyone around her feel valued. The lab carries that on.
Science shouldn’t be gatekept. Nobody’s ambition should end because they were born without money or connections.
Fellows and contributors
In 2025 we called for open contributions from underrepresented researchers around the world. Together we wrote papers on why language models hallucinate, and built open-source tools with more than 2,000 GitHub stars.
People who’ve researched with us have co-authored a paper at ICML 2026 and our 2026 preprints. Student researchers who’ve worked with us have gone on to PhDs at UCL and the University of Barcelona.
Founder
Leon Chlon, PhD, is AI Research Lead at PhysicsX. He was previously a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford (Torr Vision Group), a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and a research affiliate at MIT, and did his PhD in machine learning at the University of Cambridge (Pembroke College). He has worked on machine learning at Meta, Uber/Careem and McKinsey, and wrote a free textbook, Information Geometry for Generative Models.
Talks and press
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WIRED August 2026
Quoted by Isabella Ward in “Coders Say They Already Found Workarounds to Claude’s Invisible Watermarks”, on how the watermarks in AI-written text can be removed.
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Agentic AI Foundation, London September 2026
Training-Free Self-Improving Agents: what a frozen model can still do to improve itself, counted in bits. Alongside speakers from Google DeepMind, Imperial, Prolific and Vercel; 687 people registered.
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NVIDIA GTC 2026
Berry, our hallucination detector, was featured at NVIDIA’s GTC conference.
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ICAIRE, Riyadh October 2025
An invited talk at the International Center for AI Research and Ethics, the UNESCO-affiliated centre in Riyadh.
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UCL Data Science Society October 2025
UCL’s Data Science Society invited Hassana Labs to share our work with its members.
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AE Global Summit, London 2025
A talk at the AE Global Summit on Open Problems for AI, run by Thinking About Thinking.
Milestones
- Berry, then called HallBayes, passed 1,000 GitHub stars in under a month (September 2025).
- One of our open-source releases raised £500 for a UNICEF fundraiser for Sudan (December 2025).
Support
Our work has been supported by Survival and Flourishing Corp, Microsoft and Google.
Contact
For research questions, collaborations and press. For fellowships, the newsletter announces each batch first: lcphys.substack.com.