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ALTER is excited to announce our continued progress on a number of fronts, despite some clear challenges and setbacks. Below we summarize our work, then our funding situation.
Before the main update, we are excited to launch our new website, here! (Direct link to English version here.) We’ve redesigned to update from the original version, and better highlight our current focus areas, contributors, and staff.
AI Policy and standards has been ALTER’s primary focus recently, and we are pursuing a number of avenues simultaneously.
We have continued working with the NIST AI Safety Consortium, primarily around CBRN and especially biorisks from foundation models, but also on reporting standards for AI systems. David gave a presentation on understanding a threat model from AIxBio use by sophisticated actors, with encouragement and assistance from Holden Karnofsky and Luca Righetti. This work is primarily impactful in assisting AI firms and informing key actors about risks, and to build norms around testing and reporting for frontier AI, rather than any expectation that NIST will impose standards.
David has also been engaging with the EU code of practice as an individual expert in order to emphasize and prioritize external auditors and evaluations for AI models as part of the safety process. The process has benefited greatly from the excellent work of the chairpersons, and seems likely to focus on key issues much more than we would otherwise have expected. (There remains an unfortunate level of focus on risks that we believe do not pass a cost/benefit assessment for regulation, especially for non-frontier models.)
We have also begun work with the ISO on an in-progress standard on human oversight of AI systems. David is participating as an author, and believes that having clear international standards pointing out the challenge and non-trivial nature of providing such oversight is high leverage, and benefits from having clear vision about large scale risks and challenges. This is true despite the fact that the process is very slow, is plausibly being outpaced by the risk itself, and does not lead directly to any form of binding requirements.
Finally, we have been able to attend a number of Knesset (Israeli Parliament) Science and Technology committee meetings on AI progress and regulation, and met some of the key actors in Israel. We currently see Israeli regulation as unlikely to be directly impactful, but will continue to monitor and engage if opportunities present themselves.
ALTER has continued to look for ways to support the Israeli AI safety community, including working directly with and mentoring individuals. Work on this has been slow due to both the ongoing war, and insufficient funding for us to support promising safety-focused researchers directly - but there is discussion of restarting the AI safety coworking days in the office to foster the community. We have also been excited to see work supported by Open Philanthropy with EA Israel focused on AIxCyber, and will continue to engage with them, and hope to help support the program and help the participants in finding useful career paths.
As we announced earlier this year, Vanessa Kosoy has joined ALTER as a researcher working on the ARIA Safeguarded AI program. As mentioned in past updates, this work is being separated from ALTER Israel, and the ARIA contract is with AshGro; it has ALTER as a subcontractor which employs Vanessa, and a small amount of David’s time for management. Vanessa is PI for the research, alongside the US-based team which she is managing. Both she and David will be attending the quarterly research update and review meeting in February. There is substantive progress on this work, much of which was outlined here and we expect that additional work will be shared separately on the alignment forum and in publications.
The joint work with RAND started more slowly than hoped, but is now proceeding apace. The details of the planned projects are not publicly disclosable, but we expect at least one publication to be released by mid-2025.
David just attended the meeting of state parties in Geneva; the conference itself was unsuccessful due to the inability to find someone to chair the meeting, but (in part because the meeting was suspended while looking for a chairperson most of the day,) David was able to connect with a number of people regarding the potential obstacles and paths forward for an eventual Israeli accession to the BWC, as well as to discuss other work in biosecurity.
We have continued our side-project to have Israel iodize table salt, and we are happy to announce that the bill we have been working to introduce now has several co-sponsors, and was introduced to the Knesset December 23rd! We will continue to monitor and engage on this process. Note that this work allows us to engage with lawmakers we otherwise would not have access to, and advances an important object-level high-leverage intervention, albeit outside of our highest-priority focus areas.
Unfortunately, ALTER remains constrained by funding with minimal runway. We are planning to apply to LTFF and other funders in the coming months for further funding. Our ongoing budget through September is mostly met via the RAND contract and ARIA work; this non-grant income was initially pursued in part because it allows us flexibility - notably, the (inexpensive) work with a political lobbyist for iodization, which was otherwise difficult to fund because of restrictions for grants. However, at this point the contract income is almost all of our 2025 income, and it is unclear whether it will extend past October 2025.
For the remainder of our funding, and a buffer for flexibility, we were previously hopeful that we would be funded by SFF. While we received a small speculation grant, we were given nothing in the main round; the grant round was both oversubscribed, and we received disappointing feedback. (In addition to the general feedback that it was oversubscribed, one grantor said that Israel was not a priority country, which seems to have been a slight misapprehension; as explained above, our policy focus is almost exclusively international, and only our talent development is primarily domestically focused. Another grantor’s feedback said that generalist organizations with multiple priorities were harder to evaluate; this seems unfortunate.)
We would be excited to hear any feedback or suggestions on our work this year, either in the comments or directly!
Executive summary: ALTER Israel reports progress in AI policy, standards, and safety work in 2024, but faces funding constraints that may impact future operations beyond October 2025.
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