Yale Jackson Initiative on AI Safety

New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America

We are building the first AI policy and safety talent pipeline at Yale University to equip future global decision-makers with frontier AI risk literacy and technical governance tools.

Endorsements made here support Yale University.

We are building the first AI policy and safety talent pipeline at Yale University to equip future global decision-makers with frontier AI risk literacy and technical governance tools.

Endorsements made here support Yale University.

Project Details

The Yale Jackson Initiative on AI Safety is essentially planned to be the dedicated home for AI safety, responsible governance, and tech policy research at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, Yale University, and the East Coast at large.

The current technical departments at Yale have a great focus on ML capabilities, but our current public policy curricula severely lags behind the explosive trends that we're seeing in the world of AI safety, or frames too much of the narrative behind hawkish national security thought. Our goal is to bridge this critical gap by running high-signal reading groups, technical policy workshops, and a flagship AI Policy Speaker Series featuring 11 confirmed/in-progress experts from places like Deepmind, Meta, LISA, GovAI, IAPS, and many more (including Brendan Nyhan, Eliot Higgins, Hany Farid, Josh Compton, Joshua Saxe, Sasha Chhabra, and Priya Donti).

The dream that this grant would fund is our foundational operating budget for the 2026–2027 academic year. This includes speaker travel/lodging honoraria for non-virtual guests, technical reading group materials, student research workshop stipends, and institutional launch logistics.

Theory of Impact

Yale Jackson MPP and graduate students regularly transition directly into critical decision-making positions across the US government, international bodies, and leading policy think tanks (CAISI, intelligence community, Deepmind to name a few). Having the resources and network from the broader AI safety ecosystem into Jackson before these individuals assume statecraft roles ensures that future policymakers understand technical alignment constraints and catastrophic risk scenarios well before high-stakes crises occur.

This past summer alone has showed the rapid acceleration of AI capabilities poses severe risks to humanity's relationship with this technology and collective truth-seeking in general. Our initiative will equip students to understand how advanced models can degrade societal sensemaking and also be responsible stewards of AI. Our mission is to ground the community in these dynamics and provide a practical entryway to broader catastrophic risk concepts without relying on narrow national security or adversarial framings.

Finally, while major AI safety talent infrastructure remains overwhelmingly concentrated in the Bay Area and London, establishing a dense, active node at Yale would be amazing for building out the East Coast ecosystem with proximity to New York. This pipeline would be amazing at attracting AI policy-minded talent across the region and channel them into high-leverage, long-term alignment and governance careers.

People

Amy Wang

Team Member

Kevin Chen

Team Member

Seiyoon Ko

Team Member

Funding Details

Start Date: Sep 1, 2026
End Date: May 31, 2027
Expected Duration: 8 months (roughly 1 academic year)
Funding Raised to Date: -
Annual Budget: -
Monthly Burn Rate: -
Current Runway: -
Funding Goal: -
Funding Stage: -
Fiscal Sponsor: -

Track Record

Our core organizing team brings direct experience across the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI), the US Intelligence Community, Google, TikTok, and philanthropic organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation, backed by active Yale Jackson administration committed to scaling the AI safety ecosystem.

Grants Received– no grants recorded

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Funding Asks

grantmaking.ai Launch Round

Applied

Minimum

$12,500

Ideal

$25,000

How the money will be spent

The minimum budget ($12,500) guarantees our core operational pipeline for the academic year. This would fully fund domestic travel, flights, and lodging for our out-of-state speaker lineup, offsite discussions with visiting experts, technical alignment curricula/API credits for model eval workshops, and basic venue/catering support to maintain a high-signal 25–30 student cohort.

The ideal budget ($25,000) scales the initiative into our dream of an East Coast governance incubator at Yale through the 2026-2027 academic year:

Visiting Expert Residencies & Global Speaker Logistics ($12,000): Covers domestic and transatlantic travel, accommodation, and event logistics for our full 11+ expert lineup, bringing international practitioners (e.g., Asia/Europe-based fellows like Sasha Chhabra) to Yale for multi-day campus residencies and small-group mentoring.
Regional East Coast Governance Summit & Workshops ($7,000): Funds a full-day regional weekend symposium and retreat at Yale, bringing together ~50 top policy and technical students across Yale, Harvard, MIT, and Columbia for intensive technical alignment and AI safety policy workshops.
Cohort Engagement, API Infrastructure & Curricula ($4,000): Covers weekly reading group catering, technical reading materials, public event recording/dissemination, and shared API compute credits for hands-on technical eval labs.
Institutional Infrastructure & Operations ($2,000): Direct expenses for domain hosting, publication design for student research outputs, and student delegation travel to major external AI safety summits.

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