V&V takes on “Pacing the frontier”

August 14, 2026

[Cross-posted to LW. These short takes try to put a verification-and-validation slant on AI-safety / alignment topics – they are not full treatments. I co-originated coverage-driven verification (CDV), and spent several decades doing verification of chips and AVs. See intro post for background.] Summary: The latest frontier model incidents resulted in the “Pacing the frontier” letter and subsequent … More V&V takes on “Pacing the frontier”

V&V takes on OpenAI’s long-horizon incidents

July 23, 2026

[Cross-posted to LW. These short takes try to put a verification-and-validation slant on AI-safety / alignment topics – they are not full treatments. I co-originated coverage-driven verification (CDV), and spent several decades doing verification of chips and AVs. See intro post for background.] On July 20 and 21, OpenAI published two unusually candid incident reports: … More V&V takes on OpenAI’s long-horizon incidents

When is misalignment just a bug? 

July 9, 2026

[LW linkpost is here] Introduction and epistemic status: This is the first post in a planned series, “Alignment as a verification problem”. I co-originated coverage-driven verification (CDV), which became the standard methodology for chip verification and is heavily used in AV safety. Back in 2015 I wrote that verifying “Friendly AI” would be our biggest … More When is misalignment just a bug? 

Coverage-driven alignment – What ‘Teaching Claude Why’ can borrow from AV verification

June 8, 2026

Summary: This post suggests that alignment training could benefit from coverage-driven verification. Anthropic recently reported that teaching Claude alignment rules (via pretraining-style next-token learning on alignment-related stories) is more effective than relying primarily on RL-style behavioral shaping. Some AV developers reached a related conclusion, but in addition tend to use a systematic, coverage-driven methodology for … More Coverage-driven alignment – What ‘Teaching Claude Why’ can borrow from AV verification

ADS residual risk – some related research

February 5, 2021

Summary: This post looks further into ways to compute the residual risk of ADS. In particular, it looks into some recent research directions, and concludes that (1) they show promise, and (2) they are not there yet. My previous post about ADS Residual Risk (RR) ended with the following tantalizing promise: A subsequent post (coming … More ADS residual risk – some related research

Estimating the residual risk of ADAS / AV

February 1, 2021

Summary: This post talks about estimating the residual risk of an ADAS / AV design. It looks at the ADS total-risk map, divides it into several areas, and discusses ways for estimating the residual risk of each. People who deal with ADS (Autonomous Driving Systems, which includes ADAS and Autonomous Vehicles) are naturally very interested … More Estimating the residual risk of ADAS / AV