Policy and Governance
The Policy and Governance Track supports research on how advanced AI is governed and how it should be governed. As AI capabilities accelerate, many of the hardest problems are no longer purely technical. They involve international coordination, policymaking amid uncertainty, state capacity, regulatory design, and translating safety goals into real-world policies and institutions. Decisions made in the next 6–12 months will shape what labs build, what governments require, and what oversight looks like for years to come.
- Stage 1: Complete the general application, including 1-2 writing samples
- Stage 2: Stream selection questions alongside possibly reference requests
- Stage 3: Interviews and work-tests
The track covers a wide range of research areas. Some streams within this track focus on concrete governance mechanisms, including evaluations, standards, safeguards, monitoring systems, and enforcement structures, while others focus on conducting policy and institutional analysis, such as comparative reviews of governance regimes, regulatory frameworks, and international coordination challenges. A separate set of streams engage with broader questions, like how advanced AI may reshape global power dynamics or how governance approaches could meaningfully reduce catastrophic risk.
We are looking for fellows who can reason and write clearly about these topics. Strong candidates in past cohorts have had backgrounds in policy, economics, law, political science, public administration, security studies, philosophy, computer science, forecasting, sociology, history, journalism, and science and technology studies.
Fellows are matched to mentors based on fit, and projects are scoped to produce concrete artifacts (e.g., policy memos, regulatory comments, technical specifications, comparative analyses, and peer-reviewed research) by the end of the program. Target audiences for the work produced in this track span AISI staff, lab governance teams, regulators, standards bodies, and the broader research and policy communities shaping frontier AI governance.
This stream will focus on compute governance, including data center inspections, export controls, and distributed training.
My stream focuses on preserving checks and balances as governments adopt increasingly powerful AI. Fellows will work on questions like how Congress can maintain oversight of an AI-accelerated executive branch (including via privacy-preserving AI auditors) and what a positive vision for government AI adoption looks like. Projects will typically produce a public report and sometimes involve engaging directly with policymakers and other stakeholders.
This stream focuses on identifying tractable policy and technical interventions to gradual disempowerment, focusing on economic disempowerment and the intelligence curse. Possible project areas include:
- Formalizing intelligence curse dynamics into a model that can be tracked and monitored.
- More durable policy solutions to mass unemployment than UBI.
- Technical interventions to extend the centaur period.
Escalation risks from state perceptions of AI capability, AI-enabled targeting, AI-enabled decision manipulation, and the impact of AI integration into nuclear command and control.
Our stream focuses on AI verification, as in how actors can check that the use of AI compute is compliant with policy, especially for enabling international agreements on AI. This sense of verification is much broader than formal verification.
This stream will focus on preparing AI governance policies for future policy windows through scenario mapping and policy architecture.
Research papers (technical governance or ML) related to evaluating and mitigating dangerous AI capabilities, with a focus on what's actionable and relevant for AGI companies
This stream will focus on AI auditing, evaluation standards, and governance.