Oregon State University is a large public land-grant research university founded in 1868 in Corvallis, Oregon. It is the first U.S. institution to offer both Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Artificial Intelligence and has significant strengths in AI, robotics, cybersecurity, and hardware security research. In the AI safety and x-risk space, OSU received SFF FlexHEG funding for work on hardware-enabled mechanisms for verifying responsible AI development, leveraging its faculty expertise in tamper-resistant hardware, physical unclonable functions, and secure processor design. The university's Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute and EECS cybersecurity group house researchers working on safe AI, hardware security, and related areas.
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Theory of Change
Oregon State University's AI safety-relevant work, particularly through the FlexHEG grant, operates on the theory that hardware-level enforcement mechanisms can provide trustworthy, tamper-resistant verification that AI developers are complying with agreed-upon policies regarding compute usage, training scale, and deployment. By developing physical tamper protection and secure processors that monitor AI accelerator usage, this approach aims to create the technical infrastructure needed for effective international AI governance agreements. If powerful AI systems pose existential risks, having reliable hardware-based mechanisms to verify and enforce development constraints could be a critical layer of defense that complements software-level safety measures and policy frameworks.
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from Survival and Flourishing Fund
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- Last Updated
- Apr 2, 2026, 9:48 PM UTC
- Created
- Mar 18, 2026, 11:18 PM UTC