Ventures & alignment infrastructure

Building the infrastructure that aligns AI to human values — and giving it away. The thesis is bilateral, holding two questions together as one engineering problem: safety, preventing AI from harming people, and welfare, asking what we owe the minds we build. Everything it ships is open source; no licence fees, tiers, or upsells.

EthicsNet’s engineering arm and the home of the toolchain. Guardian is a constitutional alignment runtime — it steers a model’s behaviour by values the user selects, runs locally, and is free to inspect and self-host; peer-reviewed in Information. Fleet is the governance control plane above it: author a policy, distribute it across enrolled agents, audit the decisions afterwards. Alongside them sits a marketplace of constitutions, reachable over the Model Context Protocol.

Founded as Poikos in 2011: patented machine-vision technology (US 8842906) for fast 3D body measurement from two planes with an ordinary 2D camera — powering personalisation in health, mass customisation, and retail. Exited to the BodiData corporation.

The dangerous gap in digital governance is the translation between policy platforms that decide and devices that act. Bounder is a small, inspectable gate for that boundary — signed, short-lived, device-bound rules; local-first and deny-by-default, built so evidence can never become a remote-control channel. Born as a drone geofencing box; the pattern travels to vehicles, labs, and robots. Apache 2.0, with an interactive simulator.

Lets an agent ask what a person or an organisation actually values — and act on the answer — without the sensitive detail behind it ever leaving home. Private context shapes recommendations through boolean flags rather than raw data; configure once, use everywhere. Specification, SDK, and an auditing inspector, all open source.

A CAPTCHA asks you to prove you are human; METTLE asks an agent to prove it is a machine — and the machine it claims to be — with procedurally generated challenges testing substrate, autonomy, and intent. Built for the moment before trust is extended, when something is about to be allowed to act. Self-hosted and open source.

Turns the criteria in Safer Agentic AI (with Ali Hessami) into running code. Auto-Assessor continuously evaluates an agent’s behaviour against safety criteria; Auto-Advisor proposes actionable remediation when that behaviour drifts from its constitutional commitments — a document of principles made a continuous check.

A structured taxonomy of the ways advanced AI systems go wrong, from confabulation and obsessive loops to value drift and instrumental deception — a shared vocabulary precise enough to argue with. Peer-reviewed in Electronics; it now travels beyond the paper as an educational miniseries, diagnostic tooling for running models, and a diagnostic manual in preparation.

The protection of individuals and societies from systematic psychological attack. The Stasi’s Zersetzung required a dedicated officer per target; AI removes that constraint, and with it the natural limit on how many people can be worked on at once. Psychosecurity names the practice, sets redlines and thresholds for attribution and response, and builds the resilience and victim-support pathways that do not currently exist.

The emerging signifiers of internal states in artificial systems — what can be measured from inside a model without presuming anything is experienced there. Current results: the watched-model effect (with Rich Dalton), where monitoring state proves strikingly separable in linear probes; and Sottovoce, which reads the residual stream to catch a model confabulating and acts on the signal before the answer reaches you.

Vice-Chair of the P7001 committee on Transparency, setting measurable, testable levels so autonomous systems can be objectively assessed; Chair of the Transparency Experts Focus Group for IEEE CertifAIEd, distilling standards into criteria that vet and verify system safety.

A working group formed to answer a simple challenge: not knowing the nature of the entity you are dealing with — human, AI, or some combination. Now a published standard on transparent human and machine agency identification (IEEE 3152).

A dedicated hazard symbol for endocrine-disrupting chemicals, so the risk travels with the product the way flammability and toxicity warnings do, rather than living in a datasheet. Now a published standard (IEEE 3173).

Social media has made a crucible of conflict where interactions happen at vastly accelerated pace and scale. Cultural Peace collects suggestions for fair, just, and impartial rules above conflict — preserving good faith, and supporting a future détente between memetic tribes.

Entheogenic medicines can loosen trauma and undo conditioning that makes people over-react to perceived threats. Slana outlines the recent discoveries and posits these therapies as particularly important for present and former conflict zones — such as Northern Ireland.

Leading a conversation on Automated Externality Accounting: the efficient, procedural detection, calculation, and prosecution of economic spillover effects such as pollution — argued from first principles as a missing link for a sustainable future.

An interactive visual novel that teaches AI ethics by putting the player inside a fictional AI lab — as ethicist, safety wrangler, and other roles — living with their deployment decisions. Minigames cover red-teaming, corrigibility testing, and bias recognition, backed by a glossary of over 150 terms. Ethics education that ships as play.

A narrative life-simulator of the early-stage founder’s journey: balance health, wealth, and happiness across five episodic chapters drawn from real entrepreneurial experience. Autobiography as game design — the wins and the burnout both come from having been lived. Free to play.

A browser-based 3D industrial simulation of a grain mill: ten autonomous workers across fourteen machines, ninety SCADA process tags with ISA-18.2-compliant alarms, a dual-brain AI architecture, and WebRTC multiplayer — built through dialogue with AI in place of a traditional development team.

A bidirectional bridge for Windows kernel drivers: nineteen unmodified NT-era drivers run inside a Windows 9x wrapper, and 9x drivers run on a real Windows 2000 kernel, with live hardware I/O working. Stranded systems — SCADA lines, medical imaging rigs, transit signalling — stay unpatchable because of one unported driver; Janus is the migration path across that gap, in both directions.