Ronald Bodkin

For seven years I've worked on risks, governance and policy for AI from the inside: leading Responsible AI efforts in Google Cloud's CTO office, serving as VP of AI Engineering and CIO at the Vector Institute (Canada's national AI institute in Toronto), and advising the Ontario and Canadian federal governments on AI policy and regulation. I contributed to the Schwartz Reisman Institute's working group report on AI certification, an early version of the independent verification of AI that is now moving into legislation. I've built companies throughout my career. I founded and scaled Think Big Analytics, acquired by Teradata, and co-founded C-bridge, which went public at over $1 billion. I bring an operator's view of what regulation does to the companies it governs. I founded ChainML to make AI agents trustworthy and accountable. That work convinced me of the problem I am now working on: governing frontier AI before it outruns our ability to control it. My focus is translation. I read frontier safety research (evaluation awareness, reward hacking, loss-of-control failure modes) and turn it into governance policymakers can use. I work with nonprofits, academia, industry, and government. I work on frontier AI oversight built on mandatory safety frameworks verified by independent, accredited organizations. I am researching novel AI governance techniques notably "comprehension audits." Comprehension audits are a novel development-process assurance mechanism to verify human understanding of AI research outputs. They test whether the responsible human teams can explain specific aspects of frontier AI R&D. With independent administration and graded reports, they provide a gate to stop based on a failure to demonstrate human understanding until remediated. They are complementary to most existing safety mitigations that examine research artifacts. They are also distinct from *scalable oversight* that targets the safety risk from AI outputs too advanced for human understanding.

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