Transluce

Transluce is an independent nonprofit AI research lab headquartered in San Francisco, California. The organization was co-founded on October 23, 2024 by Jacob Steinhardt, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley's Department of Statistics, and Sarah Schwettmann, a research scientist at MIT CSAIL. The name "Transluce" means to shine light through something to reveal its structure, reflecting the lab's core commitment to transparency.

The lab's mission is to build open, scalable technology for understanding AI systems and steering them in the public interest. Transluce believes that as AI systems grow more capable, human oversight must scale alongside them—something that requires automated tools rather than purely manual inspection. Its initial technical releases included automated feature descriptions for neuron activation patterns, an observability interface for interrogating AI system internals, and a behavior elicitation agent capable of searching for specific behaviors in frontier models such as Llama-405B and GPT-4o.

Transluce is structured as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (legal name: Clarity AI Research Inc.) and follows an open-core business model: the core oversight stack is public and open-source, while hosted services and advanced features generate earned revenue. As of 2025, earned revenue from private companies and governments represents approximately 20% of Transluce's funding, with the remainder coming from philanthropic donors including Schmidt Sciences and Halcyon Futures.

The organization established the AI Evaluator Forum, a collaborative body that brings together leading researchers to set shared standards for independent AI evaluators, and released AEF-1, a standard for ensuring minimum levels of access, transparency, and independence for third-party evaluations. In 2025 the lab published an end-of-year fundraiser seeking $11 million to expand its research, scale compute infrastructure, conduct public safety audits of openly available models such as DeepSeek and Llama, and support governance and public accountability work.

The team has grown to approximately 20 core members, including members of technical staff, research fellows, a senior governance fellow, and operations staff. Notable advisors include Yoshua Bengio (Université de Montréal), Percy Liang (Stanford), and Jacob Andreas (MIT). The board consists of Steinhardt, Alex Allain, and Mike McCormick.