[PhD position] Privacy in Agentic AI - CNRS/Inria, France

[Raouf Kerkouche]

Dear all,

We are looking for a motivated PhD student to work on privacy evaluation and
enforcement in agentic AI systems, starting Fall 2026. This is a fully
funded position based in France.

LLM-based agents are increasingly used to act autonomously on behalf of users
(travel planning, e-commerce, healthcare, code generation...), interacting
with external tools, APIs and other agents. This raises serious privacy
concerns: sensitive user data flows through perception, planning and action
stages, and can be leaked, misused or extracted by malicious or compromised
components. Recent work has started addressing prompt injection and access
control in agentic systems, but little has been done on actually assessing
and mitigating the privacy risks of these data flows.

The PhD will be co-supervised by Sonia Ben Mokhtar (CNRS, LIRIS, Lyon),
Raouf Kerkouche (Inria Lille) and Mohamed Maouche (Inria Lyon). The work will
follow two directions: (1) building a risk assessment toolbox to evaluate
privacy risks on both the client side (re-identification risk of user
data/intent) and the server side (sensitivity of action plans,
trustworthiness of invoked tools/APIs); (2) designing privacy-enhancing
technologies (anonymization, confidential computing, privacy proxies) to
protect user data across the agentic pipeline.

We are looking for a candidate with a Master's degree (or final-year MSc) in
Computer Science, a solid background in machine learning and/or NLP and/or
security/privacy, and good programming skills. Prior research experience
(internship, publications) is a plus but is not a prerequisite, and we are
mainly looking for a self-motivated student who wants to conduct impactful
research and publish in top-tier AI/ML and Security & Privacy venues.

To apply, please send a CV, your transcripts of records (Bachelor + Master
or equivalent), a motivation letter, and the names/contacts of two referees
to sonia.be...@cnrs.fr, raouf.k...@inria.fr and
mohamed...@inria.fr.

Best regards,
Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Raouf Kerkouche, Mohamed Maouche