{"slug": "psa-almost-nobody-is-working-on-alignment", "title": "PSA: Almost nobody is working on alignment", "summary": "A large fraction of the AI safety community is not working on alignment, the effort to ensure superintelligent AIs follow human values and instructions. Most researchers instead focus on indirect work such as capability evaluations, risk assessments, control, and policy. This gap between public perception and actual labor allocation is a notable fact that remains underreported.", "body_md": "People often assume that a large fraction of the AI safety community works on alignment. As far as we're aware, this is not true. Most people are not working on making sure superintelligent AIs are aligned with human values or follow human instructions.\n\nCurrently, the people who we know of that work on alignment are roughly:\n\nA lot of the remainder of the AI safety community does indirect work like capability evaluations, risk assessments, control, policy, AI science, understanding misalignment (which maybe should partially count as alignment work), demos and so on.\n\nSome production alignment work (i.e., making current models behave well) might help with more ambitious alignment, too (e.g., some COT-monitoring). Many people also work on aligning current/next-generation models so that these models help with aligning future models, and hope this scales to superintelligence.\n\nWe are not necessarily saying this is bad and that people are making a big mistake (e.g., neither of us work on alignment) but it's a notable fact that seems good to make known to those who don't know about it.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/psa-almost-nobody-is-working-on-alignment", "canonical_source": "https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJo2qsEdib8RZLvW6/psa-almost-nobody-is-working-on-alignment", "published_at": "2026-06-12 05:17:39+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-12 05:51:03.192063+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-safety", "ai-research", "artificial-intelligence", "machine-learning", "large-language-models"], "entities": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/psa-almost-nobody-is-working-on-alignment", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/psa-almost-nobody-is-working-on-alignment.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/psa-almost-nobody-is-working-on-alignment.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/psa-almost-nobody-is-working-on-alignment.jsonld"}}