Into AI Safety

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

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)

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

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

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