Writing a textbook for AI Governance

The AI Safety Atlas is a living distillation and a textbook. It is already being used by ML4Good, ENS Ulm, Sciences Po, a dozen other universities, programs and thousands of students. On the technical side it has five chapters. On governance it has one. That is a start, but it isn't a curriculum. There is no coherent, current path that takes a reader from why AI governance is needed, through the institutions and law, to the technical detail of how you would actually verify or enforce anything. The goal of this project is to build that path.

An individual unit of work can be thought of as a literature review of one governance area, written to the standard of a good survey. You read the papers, the regulations, the standards, the policy reports, become the expert in that area, decide what's load-bearing and write it so a smart non-specialist actually understands the implications. Think of writing depth and standard as something similar to: International AI safety report, HAI Index Report, or the paper on open problems in technical AI governance.

Reading material: https://internationalaisafetyreport.org/publication/international-ai-safety-report-2026 https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.14981

You will both be designing the entire curriculum, making choices about which concepts should be learned in which order, and also writing the explanations for those concepts. You will be shaping this from the ground up, so you have a lot of freedom in deciding what the chapters and content should look like. We want you to be both an expert in AI governance and an excellent writer, ideally you already have expertise in one or more of these areas:

• International coordination and institutions (treaties, standards bodies, the emerging web of AI-safety institutes).
• Technical AI governance: The technical problems underneath policy, like identification, standards, verification, security, and operationalisation across data, compute, models, and deployment
• Corporate governance and regulation (frontier safety frameworks, the EU AI Act, auditing, liability).

You will also be responsible for communicating with original authors when something is unclear, or when you need to check how to represent their work.

Coherence is a property of the whole book, not of individual chapters. What you write on compute governance influences the writeup on international coordination, which influences the piece on the law. We have to use, or come up with, consistent definitions and conventions so a reader can understand the breadth of the field end to end. A change in one area can ripple through the definitions, the assumed background, and the narrative across the whole text — and across the technical chapters too, since the governance and technical tracks share the same foundation.

A lot of the real levers on transformative AI sit in governance: compute controls, international coordination, auditing and verification regimes, binding regulation. But the educational base for it is thin and scattered, especially when compared to technical safety. Someone moving into a policy role has no single current, rigorous place to build a mental model from, so they either over-specialise early or work from a shaky general picture.

A coherent governance curriculum, kept current and published openly, gives the next cohort of practitioners a shared, rigorous starting point. Because it lives in a textbook courses already teach from, the material will spread widely. A mentee finishes having authored a published survey in a governance area where almost none exist, which is one of the higher-leverage things an early-career person can do to show real depth.

This is research- and writing-heavy, for someone who already has, or can quickly build, real expertise in their area, and who helps decide what their piece should even be. You run your own literature sweeps, make the framing and inclusion calls. I read and review for correctness and for coherence with the rest of the book.

I am open to a single mentee who owns the whole project, or a team of experts that take one area each.

• Real grounding in AI governance, policy, or law in at least one target area (compute governance, international policy and institutions, technical AI governance, or regulation and law). You can read primary sources — regulations, standards, treaties, policy papers — and judge what matters.
• Strong expository writing. You can build a clear, connected account of a governance or legal mechanism, not a link dump or an op-ed. This is the main thing we screen for.
• Self-directed: able to take a review from outline to published paper with review, not hand-holding.

Nice to have: a published policy paper, brief, or well-received governance explainer (link it); experience inside a real governance process (a regulator, a standards body, a think tank); a legal background.

Remote. EU-overlapping hours mildly preferred, not required.