AE Alignment Podcast

This episode is a deep dive into a post on Anthropic's research blog: https://www.anthropic.com/research/off-switch-dual-use In this episode, James is joined by Ethan Roland, lead author of AE Studio's Gradient Routing paper, to explore a new approach to access control in frontier AI systems: modularizing dangerous capabilities during pre-training so they can be turned on and off at infere...

In this episode, James is joined by AE Studio Research Manager Pedro Ávila to discuss transitioning into a career in AI alignment, after Pedro left a 12-year career at Google to work on the problem full time. It’s a practical conversation about how someone from industry, without a PhD or a research CV, actually makes the jump. Pedro traces his route from privacy engineer at Google, through the com...

In this episode, James is joined again by Mike Vaiana, R&D Director at AE Studio, for part two of their conversation on AI alignment. Where part one motivated why alignment matters, this episode goes a layer deeper into what alignment research actually is and how the work gets done day to day. Mike walks through the main branches of the field: mechanistic interpretability, evaluations, and con...

In this episode, James is joined by Stijn Servaes, Lead Research Manager at AE Studio, to break down Anthropic's recently released Claude Mythos preview model and separate genuine signal from hype. This is for listeners who want to actually understand what's in the 244-page model card, not just the headlines. Stijn brings a frontier alignment researcher's perspective to one of the more...

In this episode, James is joined by Mike Vaiana, R&D Director at AE Studio, to lay the groundwork for understanding what AI alignment is and why it matters. This is Part I of a two-part conversation aimed at listeners who want to understand the field from the ground up, whether they're curious newcomers or considering a transition into alignment work. Mike opens with an analogy that frames...

In this episode, James is joined by Adriana Calejo, AE Studio's Director of Government and Strategic Partnerships, to explore the deep and often overlooked overlap between AI alignment and national security. Adriana shares her career journey from CIA economic analyst to counterterrorism officer to DARPA's Intelligence Community Liaison Officer, and explains why the government's need fo...

In this episode, AE Studio Research Director Mike Vaiana is joined by Research Scientist Keenan Pepper, to explore a new approach to model self-interpretation - teaching language models to explain their own internal activations. They dive into Keenan’s recent paper on training lightweight adapters that transform activation vectors into soft tokens the model can interpret as language. The conversat...

In this episode, James is joined by AE alignment researcher Alex to discuss endogenous steering resistance (ESR) , a newly studied phenomenon where large language models appear to notice when they’ve been pushed off track and then steer themselves back toward the original task. They break down a concrete example from Alex’s research, where a model answering a simple probability question is continu...