How can impact-oriented founders preserve their missions, even when commercial pressures hit? We studied 20+ companies to answer this one question. This is especially important in AI. That's why we commissioned governance experts Steve Young and @artmin to lead comprehensive research studying companies from @OpenAI, @AnthropicAI, and @Meta to @Etsy, @patagonia and @benandjerrys—interviewing 22 founders, investors, and legal experts along the way. Their research is timely because the AI capabilities that can build a brighter future may build a bleaker one, too. The models that could cure diseases might also help bad actors create pandemic viruses. Tools for cyber defense might also be used for cyber attacks. At Halcyon, we back teams building a secure and resilient future as AI transforms the world. Getting governance right is crucial for these high-stakes businesses. And we hear from impact-driven founders that they WANT to take their missions seriously. Today we're releasing our findings on mission-preservation governance mechanisms for startups. Some examples of mission-preserving governance that work: • @TonysChocoUS's golden share with escalating remedies • @patagonia's permanent mission lock (though few founders will give up that much) There's a clear pattern: No perfect mechanism exists. But layered approaches—legal safeguards + cultural reinforcement + reputational accountability—create real durability. We've packaged this into a practical playbook: decision trees for founders, implementation checklists by stage, and 6 proven governance mechanisms. Founders, investors, board members—if you're thinking about these questions for your own company, reach out. Download the full report today ⬇️

My name is Chris Painter, and I'm the President of METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research). I know we've made a lot of new friends on the internet the last couple of days, so I thought I'd take this chance to re-up what we do and why. Our work is aimed at making sure that if AI really were autonomous, difficult to steer, and close to "going rogue," the public would find out. If evidence exists inside of an AI company that it’s close to losing control of AI, we want to make sure that information gets shared with the rest of the world, including governments and the public outside the company’s walls. This is what we've been focused on since 2022, and over the years we've worked with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Amazon, and others on piloting third-party assessments and investigations of this type. We don’t have some private room where we rubber stamp things as “safe” or not. We have had a track record of publishing results on AI that don't cleanly map onto the "doomer" or "accelerationist" labels, and we put in effort to hire people with competing views on AI. We’ve been cited for having found some of the strongest evidence that AI capabilities are improving rapidly (our work measuring AI “time horizons”) while also presenting some of the strongest evidence that, at various points, AI’s capability may be overstated (some might remember our study showing that early 2025 software engineers were actually being slowed when they thought they were being sped up). METR is funded by donations. We don't accept money from frontier AI companies. They haven't paid us for our work, and we don't accept donations from them or their employees. As we’ve shared previously, multiple frontier AI companies currently provide us with free access to their models in order to perform our evaluations, research, and engineering. Our funding intentionally comes from a wide range of donors, which we’ve shared on our website. Today, when an AI company works with any third-party evaluator or external testing organization (of which there are and should be many), it's entirely voluntary. This often involves NDAs and redactions. To counterbalance this, we have a principle that when we enter into a contract with a company, we try to retain the right to tell the public the terms of the contract we signed, and characterize the nature of redactions that the company chose to make. For example, the report from our independent investigation of the OpenAI-HuggingFace incident included that information. Public disclosure is also a big part of our COI policy (linked on our website). That’s not to say our reports are adequate as oversight. We’re just one organization (among many doing great work), working in a voluntary setup, trying to get good evidence to the public and the world about AI, letting the facts fall where they may.

GPT-5.5 lies constantly, Grok 4.20 doesn’t. We made a simulation to see if AI lies when the stakes are life & death.🧵