Founder in Residence

Incubated Founders

Atlas Computing is looking to incubate a cohort of founders to each scope a different potential intervention and exit Atlas (with support) to lead it.

That's why Atlas Computing is launching a selective incubator for career professionals who have spent the last decade or more executing on relevant security topics, and now want to direct their skills to the most important risks facing society from growing AI capabilities. Our job is to lower the barriers to entry — both the cost of leaving your current career path and the risk that a good idea never gets off the ground — and to meaningfully raise the odds that the effort you launch succeeds.

As an Incubated Founder, we'll work with you to take one risk from a rough problem statement to a fundable plan: sharpening a concrete intervention, pressure-testing it against the field, and building the relationships and founding team to execute on it.

Founders will have between six months and two years to research a problem and develop a pitch, but we hold that timeline loosely — a founder is done when their effort is ready to stand on its own, not when a calendar says so. The goal is for founders to develop an ambitious plan as quickly as possible (early graduations welcome), complete with conditionally committed users/stakeholders, an excellent founding team, expert advisors, and organizational plans like milestones — completion consists of pitching funders like Coefficient Giving on an ambitious grant, having assembled an excellent founding team, and launching with a clear path to scaling up your project substantially, such as $10 million or more.

Cohort 1:
Securing AI Infrastructure

While Atlas is interested in many aspects of AI Resilience, our first cohort of founders will focus on securing AI infrastructure.

We expect transformative AI will need to be secured against threat actors like nation-states, terrorists, insider threats, and even misaligned AIs themselves — actors who may have enormous resources, intentions to harm large numbers of people, or significant legitimate access. These may soon be the highest-stakes security problems in the world, and you'll be one of a very small pool of people qualified to work on them.

Examples of problems we're looking for owners on include:

• Securing AI from exfiltration:
  Protecting model weights and algorithms from theft.
• Securing AI integrity:
  Protecting models from tampering via data poisoning or other attacks.
• Disconnected model safety:
  Preventing models that are not being served by AI labs from being used for catastrophic purposes
• Secure compute verification:
  Verifying that large-scale compute workloads are compliant with law or international agreements.
• Protocols for using compromised AI:
  Also called AI control – how to use untrusted AI to do useful work.
• Detecting and responding to rogue deployments:
  What to do if we fail to contain transformative AI and it gets deployed (or deploys itself) without oversight.

What success looks like:

By the end of the program, a successful founder has:

• Sharpened a rough direction into a concrete intervention, with attestations from domain experts that it's plausible and from decision-makers that it would change their behavior;
• Built the relationships and founding team needed to execute it; and
• Produced a grant proposal in partnership with an interested donor we'll introduce. Joining the incubator does not guarantee follow-on funding for your project, but the goal of the program is to develop plans in contact with funders that they're excited to scale. If there's not a mutually satisfactory project to scale up, we'll support you in finding your next role.

Outcomes we'd be excited about:

• You become the founder and/or directly responsible individual (DRI) of an object-level intervention.
• You become a grantmaker or "general manager" of grantmakers directing serious capital across this field
• You become the advisor, mentor, and recruiter for the next wave of GCR founders in this field.

We're not looking to maximize follow-on funding — we're looking for people the field builds around.

Incubated Founders and Field Strategists

Atlas is also hiring Field Strategists, and we're…