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Research
A selection of research conducted by Pivotal fellows.
31 Aug 2026
Workload Identification with Physical Side Channels for AI Governance
Researcher: Simone Gargiulo
Mentor: Gabriel Kulp
Technical AI Governance
12 Aug 2026
Silent Updates: Measuring and Closing the Post-Deployment Disclosure Gap
Researcher: Sophia Abraham
Mentor: Ben Bucknall
Technical AI Governance
3 Aug 2026
Privacy-Preserving AI Verification via Minimal Information Disclosure
Researcher: Sleem Abdelghafar
Mentor: Gabriel Kulp
Technical AI Governance
1 Aug 2026
A False Average: Chain-of-Thought Monitors Collapse Where They Are the Only Defense
Researcher: Shikhar Shiromani
Mentor: Noah Y. Siegel
Technical AI Safety
8 Jul 2026
Can the U.S. and China Deny AI?
Researcher: Felix Choussat
Mentor: Oscar Delaney
AI Governance
6 Jul 2026
Compressed Computation under L⁴ Loss is likely Computation in Superposition
Researcher: Francisco Ferreira da Silva
Mentor: Stefan Heimersheim
Technical AI Safety
3 Jul 2026
Individual Parameters in Weight-Sparse Transformers Appear Interpretable
Researcher: Arnau Marin-Llobet
Mentor: Stefan Heimersheim
Technical AI Safety
24 Jun 2026
Door's Locked, Try the Window: Measuring Circumvention Propensity in Coding Agents
Researcher: Prakrat Agrawal
Mentor: Jérémy Scheurer
Technical AI Safety
23 Jun 2026
Evidence for Feature-Specific Error Correction in LLMs
Researcher: Francisco Ferreira da Silva
Mentor: Stefan Heimersheim
Technical AI Safety
1 Jun 2026
Denying Personhood to AI: An Analysis of U.S. State Legislation on AI Legal Status
Researcher: Austin Smith
Mentor: Lucius Caviola
AI Governance
14 May 2026
Training on Documents About Monitoring Leads to CoT Obfuscation
Researcher: Reilly Haskins
Mentors: Joshua Engels & Bilal Chughtai
Technical AI Safety
3 May 2026
GPU Fingerprinting for Location Verification
Researcher: Wayne Tee
Mentor: Jonathan Happel
Technical AI Governance
30 Apr 2026
Causal Foundations of Collective Agency
Researcher: Frederik Hytting Jørgensen
Mentor: Lewis Hammond
Technical AI Safety
28 Apr 2026
AI Access Is Not Enough: Middle Powers Need Strategic Reserves
Researcher: Kasia Jakimowicz
Mentors: Prof. Robert Trager & Charles Martinet
AI Governance
23 Apr 2026
Bayesian Influence Functions for Hessian-Free Data Attribution
Researcher: Philipp Alexander Kreer
Mentor: Jesse Hoogland
Technical AI Safety
7 Apr 2026
Stochastic Gradient Descent in the Saddle-to-Saddle Regime of Deep Linear Networks
Researchers: Guillaume Corlouer & Avi Semler
Mentors: Alexander Strang & Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel
Technical AI Safety
4 Feb 2026
Attack Selection Reduces Safety in Concentrated AI Control Settings against Trusted Monitoring
Researchers: Joachim Schaeffer & Arjun Khandelwal
Mentor: Tyler Tracy
Technical AI Safety
1 Dec 2025
Factor(T,U): Factored Cognition Strengthens Monitoring of Untrusted AI
Researcher: Aaron Sandoval
Mentor: Cody Rushing
Technical AI Safety
1 Dec 2025
Beyond Vibe Decision Theory: Asymmetric Manipulation Vulnerabilities in LLM Multi-Agent Coordination
Researcher: Sukanya Krishna
Mentor: Tobin South
Technical AI Safety
20 Nov 2025
The Multi-Agent Off-Switch Game
Researcher: Soroush Ebadian
Mentor: Lewis Hammond
Technical AI Safety
12 Nov 2025
Decomposition of Small Transformer Models
Researcher: Casper L. Christensen
Mentor: Logan Riggs Smith
Technical AI Safety
14 Oct 2025
Influence Dynamics and Stagewise Data Attribution
Researchers: Jin Hwa Lee & Matt Smith
Mentor: Jesse Hoogland
Technical AI Safety
30 Sep 2025
Activation Probes Are Reliable With a Handful of Positive Examples
Researcher: Riya Tyagi
Mentor: Stefan Heimersheim
Technical AI Safety
26 Jul 2025
Trivial Trojans: How Minimal MCP Servers Enable Cross-Tool Exfiltration of Sensitive Data
Researcher: Nicola Croce
Mentor: Tobin South
Technical AI Safety
16 Jul 2025
Benchmarking Deception Probes via Black-to-White Performance Boosts
Researcher: Avi Parrack
Mentor: Stefan Heimersheim
Technical AI Safety
17 Jun 2025
Safety Features for a Centralised AGI Project
Researcher: Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse
Mentor: Elliot Jones
AI Governance
26 May 2025
Understanding the learned look-ahead behavior of chess neural networks
Researcher: Diogo Cruz
Technical AI Safety
14 Apr 2025
Product Liability as a Model for UK AI Security
Researcher: Gaurav Yadav
Mentor: Peter Wills
AI Governance
28 Mar 2025
Forging the Biological Weapon Convention: A Brief History of the Creation of the BWC
Researcher: Neha Suresh
Mentors: Alex DeMarsh & Gabby Essix
Biodefense
4 Dec 2024
Will the US Government Control the First AGI?—Finding Base Rates
Researcher: Luise Woehlke
Mentor: Christian Ruhl
AI Governance
4 Dec 2024
Sharing the AI Windfall: A Strategic Approach to International Benefit-Sharing
Researcher: Michel Justen
Mentors: Matthew van der Merwe & Max Dalton
AI Governance
7 Nov 2024
The Role of AI Safety Institutes in Contributing to International Standards for Frontier AI Safety
Researcher: Kristina Fort
Mentor: Oliver Guest
AI Governance
3 Jun 2024
On Labs and Fabs: Mapping How Alliances, Acquisitions, and Antitrust are Shaping the Frontier AI Industry
Researcher: Tomás Aguirre
AI Governance
14 Apr 2023
How to design an AI ethics board
Researcher: Anka Reuel
Mentor: Jonas Freund
AI Governance
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