Research Lessons I Learned at MATS & Redwood

Good empirical safety research is heavily bottlenecked on thinking more clearly. This post shares a few frames and tips I found useful, illustrated with concrete examples.I spent the better part of 2026 in empirical AI safety research apprenticeships. I was mentored by Alex Turner and Alex Cloud as part of MATS 9 Team Shard, where my collaborator and I worked on finetuning-based misalignment auditing. I then interned at Redwood Research, managed by Aryan Bhatt, where I worked on sabotage capabil...