Founding & Field-building
Securing frontier AI needs institutions that don't exist yet.
Preventing risks from advanced AI requires more than research: it requires the organisations, programmes, and funding pathways that carry the work forward. This 8-week, fully funded track within the Frontier AI Security Residency is built for founders, operators, and field-builders creating the institutions AI security still lacks.
We're looking for motivated generalists who want to work on securing frontier AI. This track is particularly suited to agentic people who are familiar with shipping projects, whether that's running events, starting up programmes, or founding.
Join FASR on a Founding & Field-Building project
The binding constraint is people and institutions, not ideas.
AI security and verification is an emerging field, and progress is limited above all by how many capable people are working on its problems and how few organisations exist to absorb them.
A handful of organisations carry most of this work today. Meanwhile, whole communities that should be in the field — hardware engineers, arms-control practitioners, applied cryptographers, security operators — have no obvious route in. Building that route is itself a technical problem, and it is tractable.
Work with expert mentors to build the field's infrastructure.
Residents are paired with mentors who have founded organisations, run programmes, and directed funding into AI security.
You'll be working to map what's missing in the field, build a strategy, and ship something concrete. The balance between diagnosis and building, and the final output of the project, will vary from project to project and is set with your mentor.
Outputs could look like an event or programme design, a funding process or landscape analysis, the first version of a new venture, or a portfolio of scoped technical projects.
This track is ideal for agentic people who can take an idea from zero to one, think rigorously under uncertainty, and are serious about building the field of people working on AI security and verification.
Target Specific Focus Areas
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Talent Pipelines
Design and run the convenings that bring new people in: a zero-knowledge proof hackathon, a bootcamp on RTL or applied cryptography, a public event on AI verification, or perhaps a hardware assurance programme for engineers and policymakers.
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New Organisation
Found the company or non-profit the field is missing. Take a hardware-security or infosecurity thesis from idea to early traction: problem validation, first hires, initial funding, and a credible path to the work mattering.
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Funding Infrastructure
Work out which security problems carry catastrophic risk, who is already on them, and where new people and organisations are needed. Scope grantable project portfolios, identify their failure modes, and support founder search.
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International Exchange
Build technical exchange on verification globally: academic workshops with international researchers, an assurance curriculum, or visiting programmes into verification labs.
