Industrializing a small field: Lessons from Vannevar

The AI Safety community must shift from a 'pull' model of waiting for grant applications to a 'push' model of actively recruiting senior researchers, according to a blog post from Canary Institute. The post cites the Manhattan Project as an example, where Vannevar Bush personally recruited academics to mobilize the physics community. It notes that despite a large funding wave heading toward AI Safety, there is a lack of active recruitment, and suggests funders should approach experts like Aumann and Lindell to pivot their research.

Crossposted from canaryinstitute.ai/blog/lessons-from-vannevar. Related LW pieces on AI Safety field-building and the push-vs-pull question. AI Safety needs to quickly transform from a "community" to an "industry"; the Manhattan Project is a good example Many folks know about the "Einstein letter" 1 which was dated 87 years ago today. As legend has it, this led to the formation of the Manhattan Project. But actually this is only half the story: the original forays were plagued by institutional apathy, with multiple occasions when key scientific reports just didn't move. In one famed instance, the Brits realized that the bomb would only require a few kilograms of uranium instead of tons from earlier estimates , and sent a report to the head of the American uranium committee... who put it in his safe and didn't tell a soul. 2 Eventually Mark Oliphant realized "somebody has to, and no one else will", so he got on a military transport plane heading to the USA, and started personally pounding on doors until the analysis got the attention it needed. What probably was the biggest unlocking of the whole wartime research effort was Vannevar Bush walking into FDR's office to gain the institutional authority and money , and then personally recruiting a handful of academics 3 to mobilize the rest of the physicists into working on key problems of which the Manhattan Project was ultimately the most significant . I bring this up because from what I've found, the AI Safety community hasn't done a lot of active recruitment of senior key personnel. As just one example, I'm reviewing materials related to the FASR https://www.securefrontier.ai/ program today, and while the small AI-verification literature has adopted the "covert adversary" framework 4 , I can't find any public indication that any of the AI Safety funders have gone to Aumann or Lindell and said "hey, you know that great paper y'all wrote? Could you take this pile of money and do some more?" I suggest that folks worried about AI Safety should change from a "pull" mindset of "Fill out a grant application on our website", to a "push" mindset of "we know we need more of X, let's find folks working on closely-related Y and see what they need to pivot". We do have RFPs, but it looks like there's a terrible lack of active recruitment. The urgency comes from what others are already noting https://counterfactual.blog/p/how-to-actually-spend-billions-on : a big funding wave is heading toward AI Safety, and the existing pull-model machinery won't absorb it at scale. Different scale of funding requires different scale of influence. To their credit, it looks like Palisade has been doing great work in the past year with making AI timelines legible to policymakers dare I say that there's an Oliphant loose in the China hawks? . But we need folks doing the same thing on the academic side, and right now it looks like we're recruiting individual residents for small programs, instead of showing up with grants and getting entire CS research groups to change their focus. Full text at Wikisource https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Albert Einstein to Franklin D. Roosevelt - August 2, 1939 ; scan of the original in the FDR Presidential Library's documents collection http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/pdfs/docsworldwar.pdf . Largely drafted by Leo Szilard; August 2 is the date on the letter, and Alexander Sachs delivered it to Roosevelt on October 11, 1939 drafting history https://www.dannen.com/ae-fdr.html . ↩︎ https://www.lesswrong.com/feed.xml fnref-uSCQFc4Xsjw2hm6Fh-1 Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb 1986 , pp. 372-374: Briggs "had put the reports in his safe and had not shown them to members of his committee." Summarized at the Atomic Heritage Foundation, "The S-1 Committee" https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/s-1-committee/ . ↩︎ https://www.lesswrong.com/feed.xml fnref-uSCQFc4Xsjw2hm6Fh-2 Karl T. Compton president, MIT , James B. Conant president, Harvard , Frank B. Jewett president, National Academy of Sciences and chairman of the board, Bell Labs , and Richard C. Tolman dean of the graduate school, Caltech . Irvin Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War 1948 ; full roster at the Library of Congress OSRD collection guide https://guides.loc.gov/technical-reports/osrd . ↩︎ https://www.lesswrong.com/feed.xml fnref-uSCQFc4Xsjw2hm6Fh-3 Yonatan Aumann and Yehuda Lindell, "Security Against Covert Adversaries: Efficient Protocols for Realistic Adversaries," Journal of Cryptology 23 2 :281-343 2010 , doi:10.1007/s00145-009-9040-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00145-009-9040-7 ; extended abstract at TCC 2007. For its adoption as the threat model of AI-verification work, see e.g. Cankaya 2026, arXiv:2606.00279 https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00279 . ↩︎ https://www.lesswrong.com/feed.xml fnref-uSCQFc4Xsjw2hm6Fh-4 The UK's Alignment Project https://alignmentproject.aisi.gov.uk/ does fund cryptographers Vaikuntanathan, Zamir, Guruswami , mostly for watermarks, backdoors, and hardness results; only one grant Vaikuntanathan's "Verification, Robustness and Alignment through a Cryptographic Lens" is explicitly for verification. ↩︎ https://www.lesswrong.com/feed.xml fnref-uSCQFc4Xsjw2hm6Fh-5