General AIInvestment · $40-100M
Trillium Labs launches open AI research nonprofit
WIRED AIhigh confidence
Why it matters
- →Establishes a new model for open safety research outside proprietary labs.
- →Targets critical but opaque areas like recursive self-improvement with public transparency.
- →Signals significant investor interest in institutionalizing open AI governance.
Nathan Lambert and Tom Zick have founded Trillium Labs, a nonprofit dedicated to open-source AI safety research. The organization aims to raise between $40 million and $100 million, with initial backing from Schmidt Sciences and Halcyon Futures. Trillium will focus on publishing detailed methodologies for recursive self-improvement and reinforcement learning, areas typically kept secret by major labs. This approach seeks to enable independent replication and scrutiny of high-risk AI behaviors.
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Earlier coverage that leads up to this article, and what followed. Lines connect each piece to the closest one after it, converging here.
How we got here
- 1Google DeepMind Launches $10M AI Safety Research Fund
Google DeepMind · June 10, 2026 · Related
- 2Google DeepMind Funds Multi-Agent AI Safety Research
MIT Technology Review AI · June 11, 2026 · Related
- 3ZML Launches Free Inference Software for AI Chips
TechCrunch AI · July 8, 2026 · Background
- 4AI Research Faces New Academic Challenges
MIT Technology Review AI · August 10, 2026 · Background
- 5Hugging Face Explores Boundary-Aware AI Safety
Hugging Face Blog · September 8, 2026 · Background
- 6AI Researchers Voice Concerns Over Recursive Self-Improvement
WIRED AI · September 11, 2026 · Background
- 7MIT Develops AI Method for Safety-Critical Tasks
MIT News AI · September 14, 2026 · Background
- 8MIT Transit Lab gets $2.1M for AI transit platform
MIT News AI · September 30, 2026 · Background
What happened next
- 9Circuit Breaker Labs tests AI safety with human-like agents
TechCrunch AI · October 2, 2026 · Background
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