80% of MATS alumni who completed the program before 2025 are still working on AI safety today, based on a survey of all available alumni LinkedIns or personal websites (242/292 ~ 83%). 10% are working on AI capabilities, but only ~6 at a frontier AI company (2 at Anthropic, 2 at Google DeepMind, 1 at Mistral AI, 1 extrapolated). 2% are still studying, but not in a research degree focused on AI safety. The last 8% are doing miscellaneous things, including non-AI safety/capabilities software engineering, teaching, data science, consulting, and quantitative trading.

Of the 193+ MATS alumni working on AI safety (extrapolated: 234):

• 34% are working at a non-profit org (Apollo, Redwood, MATS, EleutherAI, FAR.AI, MIRI, ARC, Timaeus, LawZero, RAND, METR, etc.);
• 27% are working at a for-profit org (Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Goodfire, Meta, etc.);
• 18% are working as independent researchers, probably with grant funding from Open Philanthropy, LTFF, etc.;
• 15% are working as academic researchers, including PhDs/Postdocs at Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, ETH Zurich, UC Berkeley, etc.;
• 6% are working in government agencies, including in the US, UK, EU, and Singapore.

10% of MATS alumni co-founded an active AI safety start-up or team during or after the program, including Apollo Research, Timaeus, Simplex, ARENA, etc.

Errata: I mistakenly included UK AISI in the "non-profit AI safety organization" category instead of "government agency". I also mistakenly said that the ~6 alumni working on AI capabilities at frontier AI companies were all working on pre-training.

Why does the AI safety community need help founding projects?

1. AI safety should scale
   1. Labs need external auditors for the AI control plan to work
   2. We should pursue many research bets in case superalignment/control fails
   3. Talent leaves MATS/ARENA and sometimes struggles to find meaningful work for mundane reasons, not for lack of talent or ideas
   4. Some emerging research agendas don’t have a home
   5. There are diminishing returns at scale for current AI safety teams; sometimes founding new projects is better than joining an existing team
   6. Scaling lab alignment teams are bottlenecked by management capacity, so their talent cut-off is above the level required to do “useful AIS work”
2. Research organizations (inc. nonprofits) are often more effective than independent researchers
   1. “Block funding model” is more efficient, as researchers can spend more time researching, rather than seeking grants, managing, or other traditional PI duties that can be outsourced
   2. Open source/collective projects often need a central rallying point (e.g., EleutherAI, dev interp at Timaeus, selection theorems and cyborgism agendas seem too delocalized, etc.)
3. There is (imminently) a market for for-profit AI safety companies and value-aligned people should capture this free energy or let worse alternatives flourish
   1. If labs or API users are made legally liable for their products, they will seek out external red-teaming/auditing consultants to prove they “made a reasonable attempt” to mitigate harms
   2. If government regulations require labs to seek external auditing, there will be a market for many types of companies
   3. “Ethical AI” companies might seek out interpretability or bias/fairness consultants
4. New AI safety organizations struggle to get funding and co-founders despite having good ideas
   1. AIS researchers are usually not experienced entrepeneurs (e.g., don’t know how to write grant proposals for EA funders, pitch decks for VCs, manage/hire new team members, etc.)
   2. There are not many competent start-up founders in the EA/AIS community and when they join, they don’t know what is most impactful to help
   3. Creating a centralized resource for entrepeneurial education/consulting and co-founder pairing would solve these problems

I am a Manifund Regrantor. In addition to general grantmaking, I have requests for proposals in the following areas:

• Funding for AI safety PhDs (e.g., with these supervisors), particularly in exploratory research connecting AI safety theory with empirical ML research.
• An AI safety PhD advisory service that helps prospective PhD students choose a supervisor and topic (similar to Effective Thesis, but specialized for AI safety).
• Initiatives to critically examine current AI safety macrostrategy (e.g., as articulated by Holden Karnofsky) like the Open Philanthropy AI Worldviews Contest and Future Fund Worldview Prize.
• Initiatives to identify and develop "Connectors" outside of academia (e.g., a reboot of the Refine program, well-scoped contests, long-term mentoring and peer-support programs).
• Physical community spaces for AI safety in AI hubs outside of the SF Bay Area or London (e.g., Japan, France, Bangalore).
• Start-up incubators for projects, including evals/red-teaming/interp companies, that aim to benefit AI safety, like Catalyze Impact, Future of Life Foundation, and YCombinator's request for Explainable AI start-ups.
• Initiatives to develop and publish expert consensus on AI safety macrostrategy cruxes, such as the Existential Persuasion Tournament and 2023 Expert Survey on Progress in AI (e.g., via the Delphi method, interviews, surveys, etc.).
• Ethics/prioritization research into:
  • What values to instill in artificial superintelligence?
  • How should AI-generated wealth be distributed?
  • What should people do in a post-labor society?
  • What level of surveillance/restriction is justified by the Unilateralist's Curse?
  • What moral personhood will digital minds have?
  • How should nations share decision making power regarding transformative AI?
• New nonprofit startups that aim to benefit AI safety.

Gemini 3 estimates that there are 15-20k core ML academics and 100-150k supporting PhD students and Postdocs worldwide. If the TMLR sample is representative, this indicates that there are:

• ~20k academics interested in any of the above research areas.
• ~15k academics interested in the non-robustness research areas.
• ~5k academics interested in AI safety or alignment (note that this might include RLHF).

I analyzed the research interests of the 454 Action Editors on the Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) Editorial Board to determine what proportion of ML academics are interested in AI safety (credit to @scasper for the idea).

• 14% of editors listed any of "robustness", "trustworthy", "interpretable", "safety", "alignment", "evaluation", or "security" as a research interest.
• 10% of editors listed any of "trustworthy", "interpretable", "safety", "alignment", "evaluation", or "security" as a research interest. I excluded "robustness" as much of this research is considered more "capabilities" than "safety".
• 3.7% of editors listed "safety" or "alignment" as a research interest.

a MATS-like program that is more oriented around doing ambitious understanding of the nature of intelligence

Sounds like PIBBSS/PrincInt!

Cheers, Cleo!

• Even if AI safety founders should be risk averse, I think we should do better at supporting the relatively few competent founder-types who are deeply interested in AI safety.
• I suspect that we disagree significantly on the potential downside risk of most AI safety startups. I think it's relatively hard to have a significant negative impact, particularly one that outweighs the expected benefits, given how much optimization pressure is being applied to advancing AI capabilities across the economy. Creating a new frontier AI company (e.g., Mistral-sized) or a toxic advocacy org would be notable exception. Maybe Mechanize and Calaveras are exceptions too?
• Note that at least Anthropic has a hard time finding talent that is also mission-aligned, which they prefer, particularly for safety teams.

Thanks for sharing, Akshyae! Based on the DMs I received after posting this, I think your experience is unfortunately common. Great job sticking at it and launching Explainable!

Can you share which?

True, but we accepted 75% of all scholars into the 6-month extension last program, so the pressure might not be that large now.