A professor at the University of Tennessee spent years sharing research with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein before leaving the university in 2021, according to emails released by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Between 2009 and 2016, Associate Professor of Computer Sciences Itamar Arel spoke with Epstein about facial recognition technology and humanoid robots. The project for the Jeffery Epstein VI Foundation used funds supplied by the convicted sex-offender – and the time of UT students.
Arel began working as a professor at UT's Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2003, records show, where he was also the head of UT’s Machine Intelligence Lab for at least ten years. During his time at the university he conducted extensive research on machine learning and taught graduate and undergraduate classes on AI, all while funneling some of his findings into the Epstein-backed endeavor to produce a functional artificial intelligence.
According to a University of Tennessee spokesperson, Arel departed from his role at UT in 2021. WUOT News’ repeated attempts to reach the former professor, who currently works in the private sector, have been unsuccessful.
Arel met with registered sex offender
Epstein first expressed interest in Arel’s work at UT in 2009, when prominent AI researcher Ben Goertzel introduced the two via email. Goertzel said he and Arel were collaborating on a machine learning project capable of imitating and even surpassing human intelligence, something he calls “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI.
Arel had published a paper earlier that year discussing an AGI-model he developed alongside graduate students at the University of Tennessee that was capable of limited facial recognition he called “DeSTIN.”
DOJ records show Arel met Epstein for the first time when he traveled to Florida with Goertzel in 2009 on a trip wholly-financed by the disgraced billionaire. The two visited Epstein at his Palm Beach home, where the financier had pleaded guilty to abusing underage girls and registered as a sex offender just a year prior.
Details about what happened during Arel’s meeting with Epstein are unclear. Several follow-up emails were sent from both the UT professor and Groetzel thanking the financier for their meeting. Some appear to indicate Epstein was primarily interested in Arel’s facial recognition work at UT.
About a month after the meeting, Arel sent another message suggesting he needed support of some kind to continue his work.
“I'm ready to change the world, given a chance to do so,” Arel wrote.
Epstein began expressing interest in artificial intelligence and the sciences as early as 2002, when he hosted several of the world’s top researchers at an AI summit at St. Thomas Island, not far from the private island where he trafficked underage girls for decades.
The billionaire had many meetings with scientists and researchers from around the world where he discussed ideas of transhumanism, a movement that seeks to enhance human physical and mental capabilities through science. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Epstein kept over a dozen professors and researchers close, including a former president of Harvard.
In Arel’s case, Epstein wanted to finance a project to develop a working artificial intelligence capable of facial recognition.
Developing a robot for Epstein
By March of 2010, Arel and Goertzel had prepared a draft research and development proposal for the Epstein Foundation. Their ultimate goal was to develop a “robotic AGI toddler,” according to emails. Goertzel placed a $3 million price tag on the project.
"The goal is to … create an AGI system with the rough general intelligence of a human 3-4 year old child, demonstrated via embodiment in virtual world characters and humanoid robots,” the proposal reads.
The proposal delivered to Epstein names Arel as a primary investigator who would work to implement the DeSTIN system he developed at UT in the project. Goertzel suggested at one point that Epstein could even provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional funding for the project so that Arel could hire assistants to help him at UT.
It’s unclear if these assistants were ever hired at the University of Tennessee or funded by Epstein.
In 2011, Arel asked Epstein for $50,000 to fund a sabbatical at the George Mason University near Washington, D.C. He shared he had been invited by researchers there to collaborate on AGI projects.
“Given your interest in AGI research, I thought of writing to you in the hope that you may be interested in supporting my research work,” Arel wrote.
Also unclear is whether Epstein wired this money to Arel, or if the associate professor participated in the sabbatical at GMU in the first place.
From 2011 on, most of Arel’s mentions in the DOJ’s files come from emails between Epstein and others. Goertzel mentions Arel several times in emails to the sex offender asking for additional funding. In 2014, Epstein suggested Arel could oversee a $50 million Israeli-scholarship fund similar to the United States’ Rhodes Scholarship.
While mention of the ‘robotic toddler’ in correspondence became scarce by this time, the work Arel and Goertzel had done in AI was eventually applied in the creation of “Sophia” in 2017, a humanoid robot designed by Goertzel which possessed facial recognition technology similar to Arel’s system developed at UT.
Lingering connections
Email correspondence between Arel and Epstein after 2011 is not included in the DOJ’s latest release of files. However, some emails from LinkedIn show the two were interacting with each other on social media as late as 2017, just two years before Epstein was arrested by FBI agents on federal sex trafficking charges.
Since his departure from UT, Arel has worked almost exclusively in the private industry. In 2017 he founded Apprente, a company which developed an AI-voice-agent capable of taking orders in drive-thrus. That company was purchased by McDonald’s in 2019. He then co-founded Tenyx in 2022, where he developed AI models that could handle customer service tasks. He sold that company to Salesforce in 2024.
According to Arel’s LinkedIn, he’s currently a venture partner at Marado Ventures, an AI investment firm.
It’s unclear whether Arel knew about Epstein’s criminal behavior. When Epstein was imprisoned in 2019, Goertzel denied knowledge of the financier’s sex-trafficking in an email to The New York Times.
“The stuff I’m reading about him in the papers is pretty disturbing and goes way beyond what I thought his misdoings and kinks were,” Goertzel told the Times. “Yecch.”
Epstein was found dead in his New York prison cell weeks later. Authorities ruled his death a suicide. In the years following, public interest in the millions of files kept by Epstein that are now in the hands of federal prosecutors has grown exponentially.
