The Alignment Agenda
A research roadmap for making advanced AI systems evaluable, interpretable, and controllable.
Listen
The Alignment Agenda: A Portfolio Approach to AI Safety
A ~12-minute audio interview about the report with Dr. Krzysztof Pietroszek, President of FAIR Labs. Produced with www.allais.com.
Summary
Alignment is not one problem. It is a portfolio of four bets. The question "is this system aligned?" has no single test, because alignment is not a single property. This volume reframes the field as four compounding bets — evaluation science, interpretability, scalable oversight, and control — each attacking a different root difficulty, none sufficient alone. The task of the decade is not to pick the winning bet. It is to industrialize all four, and to know at every moment which layer of the defense is thinnest.
Alignment is often described as a single unsolved problem. This volume treats it as a portfolio of four bets — evaluation science, interpretability, scalable oversight, and control — that only pay reliably when held together, as defense in depth. For each bet the report assesses what exists, what it cannot yet do, and what maturity would look like, then proposes a funding and institutional program to make assurance compound industrially. It closes with twelve open problems that would move the field if solved this decade.
How to cite this report
The Alignment Agenda: A research roadmap for making advanced AI systems evaluable, interpretable, and controllable. FAIR Labs Frontier Series, Vol. 05. Fair Artificial Intelligence Research Labs, 2026. Available at https://fairlabs.ai/research/frontier-vol05-the-alignment-agenda
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