Executive summary: ALTER’s mid-2025 update outlines their ongoing work across AI policy, mathematical AI safety, biosecurity, and systemic risk, emphasizing slow but meaningful progress on standards and oversight initiatives, new research on AI futures and philosophical grounding, and continued engagement with international and local networks, supported by new grants for AI policy work.
Key points:
Funding and Scope: ALTER received new grants specifically for AI policy work, while unrestricted funding from consulting work enables them to pursue adjacent initiatives such as lobbying and broader biosecurity efforts.
AI Policy – Standards and Governance: ALTER is active in both U.S. (NIST AI Security Consortium) and international (ISO) standards forums, contributing research (e.g. the July 8 preprint on oversight vs. control) and advocating for independent structures like an AI Audit Standards Board to formalize meaningful standards with broad stakeholder support.
AI Policy – Research: Ongoing projects include mapping technical AI futures and risks, promoting early-stage analysis of geopolitical and systemic impacts, and publishing philosophical arguments for treating alignment as a potentially unsolvable problem requiring embodied grounding.
Mathematical AI Safety: The formerly integrated mathematical research group has become an independent organization, with continued research output in theoretical AI safety (e.g. COLT and JMLR publications), including work on ambidistributions and compositional learning.
Biosecurity and AIxBio: ALTER is refocusing on implementation-level biosecurity (e.g. gene synthesis screening, metagenomic monitoring, PPE), while maintaining involvement in international pathogen surveillance networks and national-level biosecurity regulation efforts in Israel.
Other Risk Areas and Policy Work: ALTER continues policy engagement on systemic risk, food security, and public health (e.g. salt iodization), participating in national and international discussions and collaborating with organizations like ASRA and Unpolitics.
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Executive summary: ALTER’s mid-2025 update outlines their ongoing work across AI policy, mathematical AI safety, biosecurity, and systemic risk, emphasizing slow but meaningful progress on standards and oversight initiatives, new research on AI futures and philosophical grounding, and continued engagement with international and local networks, supported by new grants for AI policy work.
Key points:
Funding and Scope: ALTER received new grants specifically for AI policy work, while unrestricted funding from consulting work enables them to pursue adjacent initiatives such as lobbying and broader biosecurity efforts.
AI Policy – Standards and Governance: ALTER is active in both U.S. (NIST AI Security Consortium) and international (ISO) standards forums, contributing research (e.g. the July 8 preprint on oversight vs. control) and advocating for independent structures like an AI Audit Standards Board to formalize meaningful standards with broad stakeholder support.
AI Policy – Research: Ongoing projects include mapping technical AI futures and risks, promoting early-stage analysis of geopolitical and systemic impacts, and publishing philosophical arguments for treating alignment as a potentially unsolvable problem requiring embodied grounding.
Mathematical AI Safety: The formerly integrated mathematical research group has become an independent organization, with continued research output in theoretical AI safety (e.g. COLT and JMLR publications), including work on ambidistributions and compositional learning.
Biosecurity and AIxBio: ALTER is refocusing on implementation-level biosecurity (e.g. gene synthesis screening, metagenomic monitoring, PPE), while maintaining involvement in international pathogen surveillance networks and national-level biosecurity regulation efforts in Israel.
Other Risk Areas and Policy Work: ALTER continues policy engagement on systemic risk, food security, and public health (e.g. salt iodization), participating in national and international discussions and collaborating with organizations like ASRA and Unpolitics.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.