David participated in the Summer 2024 MATS cohort under the mentorship of Lisa Thiergart of MIRI's technical governance team, during which he developed forecasts of US-China relations in the run-up to transformative AI. His interests include international relations, history, wargames, and systems design. David has a BS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University and a professional background in video game design.
The Summer 2024 cohort marked a significant expansion, supporting approximately 90 scholars with 40 mentors—the broadest mentor selection in MATS history. This cohort incorporated MATS as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, formalizing its institutional structure. The program expanded its research portfolio to include at least four governance mentors alongside technical research streams, reflecting growing interest in AI policy and technical governance work. The 10-week research phase continued in Berkeley, with scholars conducting work across mechanistic interpretability, evaluations, scalable oversight, and governance research.Notable outputs from this cohort include research on targeted manipulation and deception in LLMs trained on user feedback, which was accepted to NeurIPS workshops, and contributions to an AI safety via debate paper that won best paper at ICML 2024. One scholar co-founded Decode Research, a new AI safety organization focused on building interpretability tools.
David Abecassis
