[Jurisdiction-specific] Public-Sector AI Resilience Agenda

Context: in most countries, there is now some movement on adapting the "machinery of government" to powerful AI. Often, the main way they do this is founding or expanding a handful of units, most commonly AISIs and government AI adoption teams/ministries. But TAI will affect the work of every part of every government - both cross-cuttingly and in unit-specific ways. For example, a cross-cutting effect could be that all units see what we term "agentic flooding": surges in citizen demand for their services, as AI makes submission cheaper. Unit-specific effects could be, for example, health ministries needing to introduce biorisk protocols, or labor ministries needing to report and respond to job-market changes much more granularly.

Problem: Though the establishment of these AI-focused units is welcome, it's unclear whether they are sufficient to drive the necessary transformation of government. Two concrete issues are (a) lacking mandate - for example, UK AISI is not authorized to set cybersecurity policy for the rest of government, even where they identify cyber-relevant risks, and (b) that historically, creating a new unit to deal with an issue has _dis_incentivized other ones from thinking about it themselves.

As a result, there may be a massive state capacity overhang between knowing what to do in theory, and (preparing to) act on it. That seems bad. In particular, it's plausible that this lack of whole-of-government thinking worsens how bad catastrophic risks are, if responsibilities and chain of command are unclear in an emergency.

Approach: This project would advance government-wide AI resilience agenda[s]. Depending on mentee interests and skills, it could take two forms. The first is academic and not country-specific: targeting, for example, a [mega]paper on preparing government institutions for TAI, or a paper focusing on a specific part of government (eg. preparing medical and population health units for biorisk).

The other approach would be more jurisdiction-specific and policy-focused, focusing on more concrete actions that may make sense given existing government structures, laws, political situation etc. The output would likely be a policy memo. I would be happy to mentor a project doing this in any jurisdiction, but most excited about/best suited for US, UK, EU, or an EU member state.

I believe most governments have a significant capacity deficit, which would prevent or slow mitigation or containment of AI risks even where they know what to do in theory. In my experience this is frequently more a question of tailoring proposals to government machinery than of their domain-specific merit. Better proposals for how governments should transform to mitigate, monitor, prevent, and respond to AI risks could therefore multiply the impact of these domain-specific proposals.

I expect mentees to have a high level of autonomy. Illustratively, I would expect each mentee to already have a preference for the form of this project they'd want to pursue (e.g. academic vs. policy; countries/domains to focus on). They should feel comfortable owning a specific output and driving it forward, e.g. preparing it for input from me and other mentees. That said, depending on constellation it may make sense that mentees collaborate on an output, e.g. to coauthor a paper.

For context, my usual mentoring setup is 1hr call a week with the whole team (or async if topics are different) + 1 detailed pass across each mentee's doc each week.

No must-have prerequisites, but experience with/in public-sector organizations, especially in jurisdictions or policy domains of interest, is helpful.

Afternoon/evening CET for meetings