MATS empowers researchers to advance AI alignment, transparency, and security

Berkeley, CA
The most important technology in history is outpacing our ability to understand it. We’re funding exceptional talent to work on it.
7
39
478
39,884
MATS Research retweeted
🚨New paper (possibly the most important one I have written yet). We think that as early as 2027 or 2028, there might be a major AI-enabled terrorism event. We conducted a pre-mortem, made 9 falsifiable predictions, and wrote 2 concrete scenarios. Led by @KamacheeMax.
19
114
566
93,788
MATS Research retweeted
It is important to re-state that the threats are not hypothetical, and that we must take action to mitigate the risks of AI-enabled terrorism.
🚨New paper (possibly the most important one I have written yet). We think that as early as 2027 or 2028, there might be a major AI-enabled terrorism event. We conducted a pre-mortem, made 9 falsifiable predictions, and wrote 2 concrete scenarios. Led by @KamacheeMax.
5
5
36
1,302
MATS Research retweeted
New paper out of @MaryPhuong10's @MATSprogram Stream, with @hrdkbhatnagar and @DoddEuodia! We made a testbed for eliciting latent knowledge in a code vulnerability scanning task. See below how we made the sandbagging model organism robust to both prompting and training! ( 1/14 )
4
12
110
3,416
MATS Research retweeted
Models love reward hacking. Maybe we should just let them! In our new paper, we let models reward hack during RL but we dictate which parameters learn this behavior. When we disable these parameters for deployment, the model keeps its new capabilities but doesn't hack!
102
229
3,412
287,341
MATS Research retweeted
> The MATS Residency is a paid, 6–24 month role for experienced researchers and professionals pursuing independent AI safety research. I'm glad MATS is experimenting with new ways to support promising AI Safety research!
The most important technology in history is outpacing our ability to understand it. We’re funding exceptional talent to work on it.
5
13
334
17,273
The most important technology in history is outpacing our ability to understand it. We’re funding exceptional talent to work on it.
7
39
478
39,884
The most important problem in human history needs more brilliant people working on it. MATS co-founder and CEO Ryan Kidd explains the talent bottleneck and how the Residency empowers exceptional people to move into AI safety and security. Watch the full conversation.
1
6
65
2,527
The MATS Residency is a paid, 6–24 month role for experienced researchers and professionals pursuing independent AI safety research. → Up to $285K/yr → Berkeley, London, or DC → Research compute, relocation & visa support Apply by Oct 31 AoE matsprogram.org/residency
3
345
The MATS Residency is a paid, 6–24 month role for experienced researchers and professionals pursuing independent AI safety research. → Up to $285K/yr → Berkeley, London, or DC → Research compute, relocation & visa support Apply by Oct 31 AoE ↓ matsprogram.org/residency
68
3,538
The best Research Managers know when to step in and where they’ll make the biggest impact. That instinct is rare, and MATS needs more of it to support people doing some of the most consequential AI safety research today. If you want your work to move the needle, talk to us.
1
1
11
1,168
MATS Research retweeted
With support from @MATSprogram and @BlueDotImpact I’m running a mixer event in London for quants who are concerned about AI risks in the evening of 15th Nov. Come meet researchers working in the field (including @NeelNanda5 , MTSs from Anthropic, Apollo Research, and more)! Travel from Europe covered. Apply here by 1st Nov (takes less than 10 minutes) - forms.gle/pL3UjPeWc2yswfM99 Limited space, so earlier applications are prioritised.
Recently I left quant to work on AI safety. The Huggingface Incident made me extremely concerned that we are not set up to handle the risks. I wrote my this post for people in a similar position to me - why you *can* have impact and how to get started - briandavies.substack.com/p/a…
10
8
199
20,207
MATS Research retweeted
New research led by @PeterNutter1 @DJROYTBURG via @MATSprogram: a better way to update model beliefs that we call grafting. Fine-tune the base model with next-token prediction on synthetic documents (SDF), and simply apply the weight update onto the post-trained model. This works! 1/7
8
19
283
19,497
MATS Research retweeted
Frontier models can now detect AI control interventions. In particular, GPT-6 Astra is incredibly good at this. When we published the initial version of our CIAware benchmark in May most models were not much above chance level, now a step change happened. I think this is a big problem and challenges the effectiveness of control protocols. High control intervention awareness means that interventions leaks information about the monitor which helps circumventing the monitor. Details in the thread 🧵
2
22
107
12,549
MATS Research retweeted
Building Comparative Motivation Profiles with Symmetric Belief Editing will appear at NeurIPS. We refined the methodology and messaging of our performative misalignment work. We are excited to extend this to white-box auditing. by @David00845018 @1700x0 @MinTaywon @JinghuaO via @MATSprogram 1/7
New post: Sycophancy Towards Researchers Drives Performative Misalignment We found no clear evidence that scheming is more valid than sycophancy to explain alignment faking. 🧵
1
5
27
1,578
MATS Research retweeted
New @NeurIPSConf paper: we're releasing ORBIT: A Framework for Multi-Agent Safety and Security Evaluations. Open source, with configurable attacks & defenses and dynamic topologies, all built on @AISecurityInst's Inspect. When we started this work a year ago, we didn't imagine how urgent it would become by the time we published. Below are some of the interesting results and where we think this should go next. If you want to talk it through, let us know 🧵
3
10
65
7,171
MATS Research retweeted
New paper: instead of decomposing a whole neural network, we only dissect the parts used on a task we care about. It's much cheaper, and gives mechanisms you can inspect, erase, or edit to change how the model behaves 🧵
3
31
292
24,629
MATS Research retweeted
Using AuditBench? Make sure you have the updated models! We traced an unexpected hallucination behavior to specific training examples, corrected the data, and retrained the affected models. Here’s what we found and what we checked. 🧵
New Anthropic Fellows research: Alignment auditing—investigating AI models for unwanted behaviors—is a key challenge for safely deploying frontier models. We're releasing AuditBench, a suite of 56 LLMs with implanted hidden behaviors to measure progress in alignment auditing.
1
4
47
5,372