Fields Medalist launches institute to mathematically prove AI safety

Mathematician Jacob Tsimerman, a recent Fields Medal recipient, has founded the Mathematical AI Safety Institute (MAISI). The institute aims to develop formal, provable guarantees of AI safety analogous to cryptographic security proofs.

Why it matters: This is a bet that empirical red-teaming and RLHF-style alignment won't scale to guarantee safety in more capable systems, and that formal verification methods borrowed from cryptography might do better. It adds a rigorous, academically credentialed voice to a safety debate that has recently included resignations and warnings from inside labs like Anthropic and OpenAI.