Into AI Safety

Hosted by Jacob Haimes

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Aug 2026

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About the show

The Into AI Safety podcast aims to make it easier for everyone, regardless of background, to get meaningfully involved with the conversations surrounding the rules and regulations which should govern the research, development, deployment, and use of the technologies encompassed by the term "artificial intelligence" or "AI" For better formatted show notes, additional resources, and more, go to https://kairos.fm/intoaisafety/

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33 recent

August 17, 2026Episode 331 hr 59 min

Mapping Civilization's Resilience Gaps w/ Dr. Evan Miyazono

Dr. Evan Miyazono joins Jacob to talk about his path from quantum networking and Protocol Labs to founding Atlas Computing. They discuss why Atlas moved away from formal methods research and toward what Evan calls “field strategy”: identifying important problems, figuring out what interventions could actually address them, and finding the people best positioned to make them happen. The conversation also covers the resilience gap map, coordination failures, AI safety, "value alignment," and the question of how to decide what work is worth doing when there’s no obvious organization responsible for it. Check out the video version of this podcast on the Kairos.fm YouTube channel, or the extended version on Patreon ! Chapters (00:00) - IAIS Evan (05:04) - From Quantum Internet to Blockchain (13:31) - Founding Atlas Computing (18:26) - Formal Methods Explained (ASIDE) (24:40) - Narrower AI & Domain-Specific Safety (35:55) - The Pivot to Field Strategy (52:29) - Value Alignment vs. Skill (01:09:17) - The Resilience Gap Map (01:26:33) - Guarding Against Funder Capture (01:49:10) - Rapid Fire Questions (01:58:02) - Outro Links Below are the most important links for this episode. For more, visit the episode page on Kairos.fm . Atlas Computing website The AI Resilience Gap Map Atlas Computing blogpost - Civilization's Maintenance Backlog Atlas Computing blogpost - Your Solution Doesn't Know Your Problem Exists Galois blogpost - What Are Formal Methods? Patrick Collison & Tyler Cowen essay discussion - We Need a New Science of Progress Federation of American Scientists article - Focused Research Organizations

July 9, 2026Episode 321 hr 28 min

Pretraining Safety w/ Ethan Roland

What if the safest AI models weren't built by adding guardrails after training, but by shaping what gets learned in the first place? Ethan Roland, senior alignment researcher at AE Studio and first author on an ICML 2026 spotlight paper, joins Jacob to talk about gradient routing, a technique that routes dangerous capabilities into isolated parts of a model's architecture where they can be locked or removed entirely. They get into the absorption effect, KYC-style access control frameworks, and what it would actually take for frontier labs to adopt this kind of work before it's needed rather than after. Chapters (00:00) - Introduction (06:39) - Inside AE Studio (15:26) - China & the Alignment vs. Controllability Framing (18:23) - Data Filtering & Gradient Routing (Aside) (30:39) - Mixture of Experts Explained (Aside) (36:25) - Why Pre-Training Interventions Are Rare (42:43) - Ethan's Theory of Change (56:17) - Access Control Governance and KYC (Aside) (01:04:47) - The Researcher's Role in Policy Advocacy (01:11:38) - Speed Round (01:27:55) - Outro Links Below are the most important links for this episode. For more, visit the episode page on Kairos.fm . Ethan's website The paper landing page Preprint - Gradient Routing: Masking Gradients to Localize Computation in Neural Networks ICLR paper and webpage - Deep Ignorance: Filtering Pretraining Data Builds Tamper-Resistant Safeguards into Open-Weight LLMs Wikipedia article - CBRN defense NTI tutorials on bioweapons and nuclear testing

June 1, 2026Episode 311 hr 21 min

Reclaiming UBI in the AI Age w/ Joe Williams

Today's episode does double duty as an interview and an announcement. Joe Williams, host of the new Kairos.fm show "Beyond the Paycheck: Reclaiming the Case for UBI in the Age of AI," joins Jacob to talk about his background as a freelance translator and how AI quietly dismantled his livelihood in 2025. From there the conversation expands into whether this moment is really different from past waves of automation, who exactly makes up the tech billionaire class, and why you should probably raise an eyebrow when someone like Elon Musk says he supports UBI. Go check out Reclaiming UBI ! Chapters (00:00) - Intro (05:01) - Joe's Background (19:41) - What is UBI & Why Does It Matter Now? (27:25) - ASIDE: The Corporation Who Cried " My Technology Will End Work" (32:25) - Wealth Concetration & the Digital Economy (39:06) - The AI Gentry (48:13) - ASIDE: Sam Altman + OpenResearch + Worldcoin (53:38) - Powerful UBI Supporters Should Raise Red Flags (01:02:56) - How to Read AI Gentry Discourse Critically (01:10:00) - Who Is "Reclaiming UBI" For? (01:18:17) - Outro Critical Links Below are the most important links for this episode. For more, visit the episode page on Kairos.fm . NEW KAIROS.FM PODCAST - Reclaiming UBI: Work and Values in the Age of AI Josh Steimle blog post - Will AI Destroy Jobs? 500 Years of Predictions Say No Smithsonian Magazine article - What the Luddites Really Fought Against ITIF report - Oops: The Predicted 47 Percent of Job Loss From AI Didn't Happen Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence journal article - AI, Universal Basic Income, and Power: Symbolic Violence in the Tech Elite's Narrative Time article - What to Know About Worldcoin and the Controversy Around It Wikipedia page - World (blockchain)

May 12, 2026Episode 301 hr 38 min

Building Asymmetric Defense w/ Zainab Majid

Zainab Majid, co-founder of Asymmetric Security, joins Jacob for a conversation on the intersection between AI Safety and cybersecurity, as well as the future of digital forensics. Drawing from years of incident response work, she explains how cyber attacks actually unfold, why AI is changing both offense and defense, and how her team is building AI-native tools to investigate breaches faster and more effectively. Other topics explored in this episode include trust in the AI/cybersecurity industries, the realities behind cybersecurity hype, and the challenge of keeping humans meaningfully involved as these systems become more capable. Zainab also gives practical, actionable advice on how you can protect yourself. If you're interested in over 30 minutes of additional content, head on over to the Kairos.fm Patreon where you can become a subscriber for just $2 per month, which helps make this whole podcasting thing a bit more sustainable. Chapters (00:00) - Intro (04:34) - Zainab's Background (08:49) - Jacob & Zainab's History (16:03) - Founding Asymmetric Security (24:49) - How to Know Who You Can Trust (36:31) - The Threats Asymmetric Is Built to Fight (01:05:54) - What's Asymmetric Tackling Next? (01:15:33) - Glasswing, Dual Use, and Power Concentration (01:24:21) - The Relationship Between AI Safety & Cybersecurity (01:37:01) - Outro Critical Links Below are the most important links for this episode. For more, visit the episode page on Kairos.fm. Asymmetric Security website EvalEval @ NeurIPS workshop paper - Rethinking CyberSecEval Meta AI report - Purple Llama CyberSecEval Anthropic press release - Project Glasswing Schneier on Security blogpost - What Anthropic’s Mythos Means for the Future of Cybersecurity

April 6, 2026Episode 291 hr 31 min

Drawing Red Lines w/ Su Cizem

Technology has been moving faster than policy for some time now, and the advent of AI isn't changing that, so what can we do to maintain safety despite uncertainty? Su Cizem has spent the last few years trying to answer that question. As an analyst at the Future Society, she works on global AI governance, specifically on building international consensus around AI red lines: the thresholds we collectively agree must never be crossed. In this conversation, Su walks through her path from philosophy to policy, the evolution of the global AI safety summit series, why voluntary commitments from AI labs aren't enough, and what it would actually take to make international cooperation on AI safety real. Chapters (00:00) - Introduction (03:23) - From Philosophy to Policy (22:25) - What AI Governance Actually Means (26:49) - The Summit Series (43:01) - Drawing The Red Lines (01:10:51) - Can These Companies Govern Themselves? (01:24:01) - Breaking Into The Field (01:27:51) - Closing Thoughts & Outro Critical Links Below are the most important links for this episode. For more, visit the episode page on Kairos.fm. Su's LinkedIn Global Call for AI Red Lines The Futures Society report - “Facing the Stakes of AI Together”: 2025 Athens Roundtable Report Politico article - How the global effort to keep AI safe went off the rails TechPolicy.Press article - A Timeline of the Anthropic-Pentagon Dispute The Guardian article - AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying Google and OpenAI Employee open letter - We Will Not Be Divided The Register article - Altman said no to military AI abuses – then signed Pentagon deal anyway SaferAI report - Evaluating AI Providers’ Frontier AI Safety Frameworks

March 10, 2026Episode 281 hr 11 min

Thinking Through "Digital Minds" w/ Jacy Reese-Anthis

Jacy Reese-Anthis, founder of Sentience Institute and researcher at Stanford, began his journey working for animal welfare, but is now finishing up his PhD with research in many different AI subfields at the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy, social science, and machine learning. While this may seem like an odd jump at first, Jacy shares how his work has all been centered around the idea of moral circle expansion. In this episode, we dig into what sentience actually means (or at least how we can begin to think about it), why anthropomorphization is more complicated than it sounds, and how language models may be able to be leveraged as an effective tool for social science research. Jacy also shares his median AGI estimate somewhere in there, so stay tuned if you want to catch it. As part of my effort to make this whole podcasting thing more sustainable, I have created a Kairos.fm Patreon which includes an extended version of this episode. Supporting gets you access to these extended cuts, as well as other perks in development. Chapters (00:00) - Introduction (05:41) - From Animal Welfare to Digital Minds (09:00) - Founding Sentience Institute (22:00) - Defining Sentience (27:13) - The Anthropomorphization Problem (47:51) - Why "Digital Minds" (Not "Artificial Intelligence") (51:05) - LLMs as Social Science Tools (01:07:03) - Jacy’s AGI Timeline & The Singularity (01:09:23) - Final Thoughts & Outro Critical Links Below are the most important links for this episode. For more, visit the episode page on Kairos.fm. Jacy's website Wikipedia article - Jacy Reese Anthis Sentience Institute website CHI paper - Digital Companionship: Overlapping Uses of AI Companions and AI Assistants ICML paper - LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method ACL paper - The Impossibility of Fair LLMs Wikipedia article - ELIZA effect The Atlantic article - How a Google Employee Fell for the Eliza Effect

February 2, 2026Episode 271 hr 31 min

Scaling AI Safety Through Mentorship w/ Dr. Ryan Kidd

What does it actually take to build a successful AI safety organization? I'm joined by Dr. Ryan Kidd, who has co-led MATS from a small pilot program to one of the field's premier talent pipelines. In this episode, he reveals the low-hanging fruit in AI safety field-building that most people are missing: the amplifier archetype. I pushed Ryan on some hard questions, from balancing funder priorities and research independence, to building a robust selection process for both mentors and participants. Whether you're considering a career pivot into AI safety or already working in the field, this conversation offers practical advice on how to actually make an impact. Chapters (00:00) - - Intro (08:16) - - Building MATS Post-FTX & Summer of Love (13:09) - - Balancing Funder Priorities and Research Independence (19:44) - - The MATS Selection Process (33:15) - - Talent Archetypes in AI Safety (50:22) - - Comparative Advantage and Career Capital in AI Safety (01:04:35) - - Building the AI Safety Ecosystem (01:15:28) - - What Makes a Great AI Safety Amplifier (01:21:44) - - Lightning Round Questions (01:30:30) - - Final Thoughts & Outro Links MATS Ryan's Writing LessWrong post - Talent needs of technical AI safety teams LessWrong post - AI safety undervalues founders LessWrong comment - Comment permalink with 2025 MATS program details LessWrong post - Talk: AI Safety Fieldbuilding at MATS LessWrong post - MATS Mentor Selection LessWrong post - Why I funded PIBBSS EA Forum post - How MATS addresses mass movement building concerns FTX Funding of AI Safety LessWrong blogpost - An Overview of the AI Safety Funding Situation Fortune article - Why Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX debacle is roiling A.I. research NY Times article - FTX probes $6.5M in payments to AI safety group amid clawback crusade Cointelegraph article - FTX probes $6.5M in payments to AI safety group amid clawback crusade FTX Future Fund article - Future Fund June 2022 Update (archive) Tracxn page - Anthropic Funding and Investors Training & Support Programs Catalyze Impact Seldon Lab SPAR BlueDot Impact YCombinator Pivotal Athena Astra Fellowship Horizon Fellowship BASE Fellowship LASR Labs Entrepeneur First Funding Organizations Coefficient Giving (previously Open Philanthropy) LTFF Longview Philanthropy Renaissance Philanthropy Coworking Spaces LISA Mox Lighthaven FAR Labs Constellation Collider NET Office BAISH Research Organizations & Startups Atla AI Apollo Research Timaeus RAND CAST CHAI Other Sources AXRP website - The AI X-risk Research Podcast LessWrong blogpost - Shard Theory: An Overview

December 29, 2025Episode 261 hr 13 min

Sobering Up on AI Progress w/ Dr. Sean McGregor

Sean McGregor and I discuss about why evaluating AI systems has become so difficult; we cover everything from the breakdown of benchmarking, how incentives shape safety work, and what approaches like BenchRisk (his recent paper at NeurIPS) and AI auditing aim to fix as systems move into the real world. We also talk about his history and journey in AI safety, including his PhD on ML for public policy, how he started the AI Incident Database, and what he's working on now: AVERI, a non-profit for frontier model auditing. Chapters (00:00) - Intro (02:36) - What's broken about benchmarking (03:41) - Sean’s wild PhD (14:28) - The phantom internship (19:25) - Sean's journey (22:25) - Market-vs-regulatory modes and AIID (32:13) - Drunk on AI progress (38:34) - BenchRisk (43:20) - Moral hazards and Master Hand (50:34) - Liability, Section 230, and open source (59:20) - AVERI (01:11:30) - Closing thoughts & outro Links Sean McGregor's website AVERI website BenchRisk BenchRisk website NeurIPS paper - Risk Management for Mitigating Benchmark Failure Modes: BenchRisk NeurIPS paper - AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark AIID AI Incident Database website IAAI paper - Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database Preprint - Lessons for Editors of AI Incidents from the AI Incident Database AIAAIC website (another incident tracker) Hot AI Summer CACM article - A Few Useful Things to Know About Machine Learning CACM article - How the AI Boom Went Bust Undergraduate Thesis - Analyzing the Prospect of an Approaching AI Winter Tech Genies article - AI History: The First Summer and Winter of AI CACM article - There Was No ‘First AI Winter’ Measuring Generalization Neural Computation article - The Lack of A Priori Distinctions Between Learning Algorithms ICLR paper - Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization ICML paper - Model-agnostic Measure of Generalization Difficulty Radiology Artificial Intelligence article - Generalizability of Machine Learning Models: Quantitative Evaluation of Three Methodological Pitfalls Preprint - Quantifying Generalization Complexity for Large Language Models Insurers Exclude AI Financial Times article - Insurers retreat from AI cover as risk of multibillion-dollar claims mount Tom's Hardware article - Major insurers move to avoid liability for AI lawsuits as multi-billion dollar risks emerge — Recent public incidents have lead to costly repercussions Insurance Newsnet article - Insurers Scale Back AI Coverage Amid Fears of Billion-Dollar Claims Insurance Business article - Insurance’s gen AI reckoning has come Section 230 Section 230 overview Legal sidebar - Section 230 Immunity and Generative Artificial Intelligence Bad Internet Bills website TechDirt article - Section 230 Faces Repeal. Support The Coverage That’s Been Getting It Right All Along. Privacy Guides video - Dissecting Bad Internet Bills with Taylor Lorenz: KOSA, SCREEN Act, Section 230 Journal of Technology in Behavioral Health article - Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks, and Opportunities for Research and Practice Time article - Lawmakers Unveil New Bills to Curb Big Tech’s Power and Profit House Hearing transcript - Legislative Solutions to Protect Children and Teens Online Relevant Kairos.fm Episodes Into AI Safety episode - Growing BlueDot's Impact w/ Li-Lian Ang muckrAIkers episode - NeurIPS 2024 Wrapped 🌯 Other Links Encyclopedia of Life website IBM Watson AI XPRIZE website ML Commons website Wikipedia article

November 24, 2025Episode 251 hr 9 min

Against 'The Singularity' w/ Dr. David Thorstad

Philosopher Dr. David Thorstad tears into one of AI safety's most influential arguments: the singularity hypothesis. We discuss why the idea of recursive self-improvement leading to superintelligence doesn't hold up under scrutiny, how these arguments have redirected hundreds of millions in funding away from proven interventions, and why people keep backpedaling to weaker versions when challenged. David walks through the actual structure of singularity arguments, explains why similar patterns show up in other longtermist claims, and makes the case for why we should focus on concrete problems happening right now like poverty, disease, the rise of authoritarianism instead of speculative far-future scenarios. Chapters (00:00) - Intro (02:13) - David's background (08:00) - (Against) The Singularity Hypothesis (29:46) - Beyond the The Singularity (39:56) - What We Should Actually Be Worried About (49:00) - Philanthropic Funding Links David's personal website Reflective Altruism , David's blog The Singularity Hypothesis David's Philosophical Studies article - Against the singularity hypothesis Time "AI Dictionary" page - Singularity EA Forum blogpost - Summary: Against the singularity hypothesis Journal of Conciousness Studies article - The Singularity: A Philisophical Analysis Interim Report from the Panel Chairs: AAAI Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures Epoch AI blogpost - Do the returns to software R&D point towards a singularity? Epoch AI report - Estimating Idea Production: A Methodological Survey Funding References LessWrong blogpost - An Overview of the AI Safety Funding Situation AISafety.com funding page Report - Stanford AI Index 2025, Chapter 4.3 Forbes article - AI Spending To Exceed A Quarter Trillion Next Year AI Panic article - The “AI Existential Risk” Industrial Complex GiveWell webpage - How Much Does It Cost To Save a Life? Wikipedia article - Purchasing power parity Pascal's Mugging and the St. Petersburg Paradox Wikipedia article - St. Petersburg Paradox Conjecture Magazine article - Pascal’s Mugging and Bad Explanations neurabites explainer - Ergodicity: the Most Over-Looked Assumption Wikipedia article - Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence The Time of Perils Global Priorities Institute working paper - Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils Ethics article - Mistakes in the Moral Mathematics of Existential Risk Philosophy & Public Affairs article - High Risk, Low Reward: A Challenge to the Astronomical Value of Existential Risk Mitigation Toby Ord Book - The Precipice Rethink Priorities blogpost - Charting the precipice AI Futures Project blogpost - AI 2027 Trump's Higher Education Threat Compact Wikipedia article - Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education Pen America explainer - What is Trump’s Compact for Higher Education? And More Frequently Asked Questions Statement by the Vanderbilt AAUP Executive Committee on the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” The Vanderbilt Hustler article - BREAKING: Chancellor Daniel Diermeier fails to reject higher education compact, reaffirms Vanderbilt’s values and openness to discussion The Vanderbilt Hustler article - Students and faculty organize rally outside Kirkland Hall against Trump administration’s higher education compact Free Speech Center article - Compact for Academic Excellence More of David's Work Global Priorities Institute working paper - What power-seeking theorems do not show Book - Essays on Longtermism Vibe Shift Blood in the Machine article - GPT-5 Is a Joke. Will It Matter? Futurism article - Evidence Grows That GPT-5 Is a Bit of a Dud Gary Marcus substack - GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it. Pew Research report - How the U.S. Public and AI Experts View Artificial Intelligence N...

October 20, 2025Episode 241 hr 11 min

Getting Agentic w/ Alistair Lowe-Norris

Alistair Lowe-Norris, Chief Responsible AI Officer at Iridius and co-host of The Agentic Insider podcast, joins to discuss AI compliance standards, the importance of narrowly scoping systems, and how procurement requirements could encourage responsible AI adoption across industries. We explore the gap between the empty promises companies provide and actual safety practices, as well as the importance of vigilance and continuous oversight. Listen to Alistair on his podcast , The Agentic Insider! As part of my effort to make this whole podcasting thing more sustainable, I have created a Kairos.fm Patreon which includes an extended version of this episode. Supporting gets you access to these extended cuts, as well as other perks in development. Chapters (00:00) - Intro (02:46) - Trustworthy AI and the Human Side of Change (13:57) - This is Essentially Avatar, Right? (23:00) - AI Call Centers (49:38) - Standards, Audits, and Accountability (01:04:11) - What Happens when Standards aren’t Met? Links Iridius website GPT-5 Commentary Where's Your Ed At blogpost - How Does GPT-5 Work? Zvi LessWrong blogpost - GPT-5: The Reverse DeepSeek moment Blood in the Machine article - GPT-5 Is a Joke. Will It Matter? Futurism article - Evidence Grows That GPT-5 Is a Bit of a Dud Gary Marcus substack - GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it. Customer Service and AI Adoption Gartner press release - Gartner Survey Finds 64% of Customers Would Prefer That Companies Didn't Use AI for Customer Service Preprint - Deploying Chatbots in Customer Service: Adoption Hurdles and Simple Remedies KDD '25 paper - Retrieval And Structuring Augmented Generation with Large Language Models Global Nerdy blogpost - Retrieval-augmented generation explained “Star Wars” style The Security Cafe article - A Quick And Dirty Guide To Starting SOC2 Standards ISO overview - AI management systems ISO standard - ISO/IEC 42001 CyberZoni guide - ISO 42001 The Complete Guide A-LIGN article - Understanding ISO 42001 ISO standard - ISO/IEC 27001 ISO standard - ISO/IEC 42005 Governance and Regulation NIST framework - AI Risk Management Framework EU AI Act article - Article 99: Penalties Colorado Senate Bill 24-205 (Colorado AI Act) webpage Utah Senate Bill 149 webpage Microsoft AI Compliance Schellman blogpost - Microsoft DPR AI Requirements and ISO 42001 Microsoft documentation - ISO/IEC 42001 AI Management System offering Microsoft webpage - Responsible AI Principles and Approach Microsoft Service Trust Portal documentation - Responsible AI Standard v2 Microsoft documentation - Supplier Security & Privacy Assurance Program Guide v11 April 2025