Passing the Torch

Reflections on our work as I transition out of Atlas

After over a year and a half as co-founder and CTO of Atlas, I’m writing to share that I’ll be stepping away from my role at the organization. This is a personal transition, not a pivot for Atlas. Our mission to help humans govern increasingly powerful AI systems by setting clear rules remains as vital as ever. I’m thrilled that Evan and the rest of the Atlas team will carry forward this mission.

When Evan and I started Atlas, we had an ambitious hypothesis: that the future of trustworthy AI depends not just on better models, but on better review - tools that help humans understand, validate, and specify the rules that AI systems must follow. The growing pile of evidence for this claim now ranges from growing popularity of AI tools for screening AI-generated resumes to agentic misalignment, where agents behave differently when they believe they’re not being monitored.

More actionably, we believed emerging AI would make it possible to bring the power of mathematical guarantees to people who aren’t specialists in formal methods, and to develop tools that scale human judgment, not replace it.

This would have been a tall order for even the most experienced experts in the world, and I’m proud of the early steps we’ve taken toward this vision. Atlas incubated the development of two critical safety technologies and companies: the flexible hardware governors that became Earandil and the Lean autoformalization that became Theorem. In our in-house R&D, we’ve developed an IDE for specification validation backed by AI tools for aligning formal specs with natural-language documentation. And through our community engagement, we’ve helped shepherd tremendous growing attention and momentum in the GSAI community. Along the way, we’ve gotten to learn from and collaborate with pioneers in formal methods, AI safety, and community building. Most of all, we’ve built a team that cares deeply about doing this right.

Going forward, I’m thrilled that Alexandre Rademaker will be leading technical work at Atlas. Alex brings world-class expertise in logic, formal verification, and natural language processing, and he’s already been instrumental in driving our Spec IDE forward. He’ll lead our research work funded by Schmidt Sciences and our technical collaboration with the Beneficial AI Foundation, and I know he’ll do great things.

I’ll always be cheering for Atlas and I’m incredibly excited for what’s next.

Thank you to everyone who’s supported us, collaborated with us, or just shared ideas along the way. If you care about tools that help humans stay in the driver’s seat as AI systems become more capable, you should keep an eye on Atlas. The work is just getting started.