I work on AI assurance and civilisational resilience: building the technical foundations for independently verifiable claims about the behaviour of AI systems and the infrastructure they run on — from secure silicon to software to multi-stakeholder coordination.
Currently, I'm a Programme Director at the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA). I run the Safeguarded AI programme, a ~£60M R&D programme building a mathematical assurance toolkit that lets fleets of AI agents produce formally verified artifacts at unprecedented speed and scale - from verified software, to microelectornics to a wide range of cyberphyiscal control systems.
Before ARIA, I co-founded and led Principles of Intelligence (formerly PIBBSS), a research organisation facilitating knowledge transfer from interdisciplinary sciences into AI safety. I've also been a Research Affiliate with the Alignment of Complex Systems research group, and a Research Manager at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford.
Selected Work
- Gradual Paths to Collective Flourishing. Essay exploring a vision for successfully navigating the AI transition through enabling stable, win-win coalitions between humans and AI systems. January 2026.
- AI Resilience. Research initiative and web resource on R&D priorities for civilisational resilience in the age of AI. September 2025.
- Faster AI Diffusion Through Hardware-Based Verification. Essay as part of IFP's Launch Sequence, identifying concrete but ambitious AI projects to accelerate progress in science and security. August 2025.
- Flexible Hardware-Enabled Guarantees. Co-authored framework and report series on leveraging hardware architecture for AI assurance. February 2025.
- Gradual Disempowerment. Co-authored analysis of incremental AI capability growth and structural risks to human oversight. January 2025.
- (Talk) "Gradual Disempowerment." Talk at Cooperative AI Summer School. (2025).
- Avoiding an AI Arms Race with Assurance Technologies. Policy analysis for AI Frontiers. Argues that assurance technologies – such as hardware-based mechanisms and others – can help temper an international AI arms race. January 2025.
- Towards Guaranteed Safe AI: A Framework for Ensuring Robust and Reliable AI Systems. Multi-author position paper defining a family of approaches for AI with quantitative safety guarantees, combining world models, safety specifications, and verifiers. (2024).
- The Value Change Problem. MA dissertation, organised as post series. Argues that AI alignment must address the problem of (il)legitimate value change — ensuring AI systems neither manipulate human values nor foreclose their legitimate evolution. 2023.
- Towards a Philosophy of Science of the Artificial. Essay arguing that scientific realism is insufficient for design-oriented fields like AI, and that a pragmatist epistemology better accounts for how theorising shapes what comes into existence. January 2023.
- What Do We Care About in Caring About Freedom? Essay examining the underlying reasons we value freedom, with particular focus on freedom as an enabler of humanity's collective moral and cultural potential. May 2022.