Alignment Research Ecosystem — MATS, Redwood, Apollo, METR
Five organisations define the 2026 non-lab alignment research layer. MATS (ML Alignment & Theory Scholars): 527+ researchers since late 2021, 180+ papers, 10K+ citations, h-index 47; summer 2024 cohort incorporated as 501(c)(3) with 90 scholars and 40 mentors; 80% of pre-2025 alumni work on safety/security with 200+ at Anthropic, DeepMind, OpenAI, UK AISI, RAND, Redwood, METR, Apollo. Redwood Research: applied alignment lab founded by Buck Shlegeris; introduced AI Control (Lesson 10); collaborates with UK AISI on control safety cases. Apollo Research: pre-deployment scheming evaluations for frontier labs; authored In-Context Scheming (Lesson 8) and Towards Safety Cases for AI Scheming. METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research): task-based capability evaluations, autonomous-task time-horizon studies; "Common Elements of Frontier AI Safety Policies" compares lab frameworks. Eleos AI Research: model-welfare pre-deployment evaluations (Lesson 19); conducted Claude Opus 4 welfare assessment. Identify the five organisations of the non-lab alignment research ecosystem and their core output. Describe MATS's scale (scholars, papers, h-index) and its role as a talent pipeline. Describe Redwood's AI Control agenda and its partnership with UK AISI. Describe METR's task-based evaluation methodology. The frontier labs (Lesson 18) produce safety evaluations internally and publish selected results. The ecosystem outside the labs is where the evaluations are validated, where novel failure modes are first discovered, and where talent is trained. Understanding the ecosystem helps interpret which…
Alignment Research Ecosystem — MATS, Redwood, Apollo, METR: Five organisations define the 2026 non-lab alignment research layer. MATS (ML Alignment & Theory…
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