Renata Barreto, JD & PhD

Senior Research Scientist, eBay

Renata Barreto is a Senior Research Scientist at eBay, where she works on AI evaluations and AI risk governance. She holds a JD/PhD from UC Berkeley, where she focused on technical AI policy, model behavior, and the sociotechnical evaluation of AI systems.

Previously, she held research positions at Twitter, Meta, and Spotify across Responsible AI and Trust & Safety teams.

Her current research studies the societal impacts of agentic and generative systems, building technical mitigations and the evidence base for the policies institutions actually adopt. Recent work examines turning agentic governance proposals into testable evaluations, the limits of prompts-as-policy under fine-tuning, and persuasive dark patterns in chatbots.

She moves easily between languages, human and programming: fluent in Spanish, with advanced proficiency in French and Portuguese, and equally at home in Python, SQL, and PyTorch.

news

Sep 06, 2026	Presenting Alignment Inertia at the Trust and Safety Research Conference at Stanford, Oct 1–2, 2026.

selected publications

ATTRIB

Alignment Inertia: Auditing the Durability of Training Data Influence Through Policy Override Resistance

Renata Barreto, Markelle Roesti, and Mohammad Tahaei

2026

Under review, NeurIPS Workshop on Attributing Model Behavior at Scale (ATTRIB)

Bib

@unpublished{barreto2026alignment,
  title = {Alignment Inertia: Auditing the Durability of Training Data Influence Through Policy Override Resistance},
  author = {Barreto, Renata and Roesti, Markelle and Tahaei, Mohammad},
  note = {Under review, NeurIPS Workshop on Attributing Model Behavior at Scale (ATTRIB)},
  year = {2026}
}

TAI

Objection Without Action: Conversational Dark Patterns in AI-Mediated Commerce

Francesco Salvi, Alejandro Cuevas, Renata Barreto, and 4 more authors

2026

Under review, NeurIPS Workshop on Trustworthy AI

Bib

@unpublished{salvi2026objection,
  title = {Objection Without Action: Conversational Dark Patterns in AI-Mediated Commerce},
  author = {Salvi, Francesco and Cuevas, Alejandro and Barreto, Renata and Wang, Yiming and Roesti, Markelle and Tahaei, Mohammad and Horta Ribeiro, Manoel},
  note = {Under review, NeurIPS Workshop on Trustworthy AI},
  year = {2026}
}