Safe AI Forum
We work to advance technically grounded international coordination to reduce catastrophic risks from frontier AI, with a particular focus on China and US. We translate technical AI safety and governance tools into practical proposals for coordination.
Stream overview
We work on technically grounded international coordination to reduce risks from frontier AI, with a particular focus on China-West relations. Fellows may contribute to projects such as:
- Joint testing and evaluation interoperability: Developing proposals for how Chinese and Western institutions could align or mutually recognise frontier AI safety testing and evaluation practices. This may include comparing risk thresholds, evaluation methodologies, benchmark design, reporting formats, and procedures for securely sharing relevant safety evidence.
- AI incidents and crisis management: Researching mechanisms for preventing, reporting, and responding to serious frontier-AI incidents, including misuse, unexpected model behaviour, or failures of safety controls. Fellows may develop proposals for incident-taxonomy and reporting standards, communication channels, joint investigation procedures, and crisis-management protocols.
- Technical governance for international cooperation: Assessing how tools such as capability and risk evaluations, compute monitoring, safety cases, model-release safeguards, and verification mechanisms could support credible international commitments. This could also include analysing the geopolitical implications of advanced AI and identifying practical areas for China-West coordination.
Standard (1-2 hours of weekly 1:1s)
SF Bay Area
Strong preference
Strong preference
Mentors
Isabella is a Senior Researcher at the Safe AI Forum, where she works on U.S.–China coordination on frontier AI safety. Her research focuses on technical governance, particularly building consensus and advancing dialogue on loss-of-control and extreme-misuse risks, with recent work spanning technical misuse safeguards, AI control playbook, and misalignment incidents. She holds an MA in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago and a BS in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from University College London.
Yawen Duan is a Senior Researcher at the Safe AI Forum (SAIF), where he works on international coordination and technical AI governance for managing extreme risks from advanced AI. His research focuses on risks from increasingly agentic AI systems: how to set and operationalize risk thresholds and red lines, and how to evaluate and monitor agents post-deployment. Previously, as AI Safety Research Manager at Concordia AI, he led the Frontier AI Risk Management Framework (co-published with Shanghai AI Lab).
Fellows we are looking for
- Technical literacy in AI/ML, cybersecurity, or a related field. Able to understand technical papers and scrutinize claims.
- Research experience. At least one project where you independently scoped questions, evaluated evidence, and produced conclusions.
- Strong research judgment: able to identify important, tractable questions and decision-relevant uncertainties.
- Clear, concise writing for technical and policy audiences.
Project selection
We will provide a shortlist of projects that we are keen for the scholar to work on in Week 1. We'll ask scholars to scope these in the 1st week and make a determination about which project to focus on in Week 2.