Team Shard

Team Shard is an alignment research collective built around shard theory, a framework that Alex Turner (known online as TurnTrout) and Quintin Pope began developing in early 2022. The core idea of shard theory is that trained neural networks are best understood as ensembles of contextually activated computations called shards, each shaped by historical reinforcement events. Under this view, both human values and AI-learned values arise from the same kind of process, which opens a principled path to studying and potentially controlling what values emerge in trained systems. The group originated informally out of the Berkeley AI safety community, initially described as siloed under John Wentworth's SERI MATS cohort. Over time it evolved into a recognized mentorship stream within the broader MATS program. Alex Turner leads the stream as a research scientist at Google DeepMind's Scalable Alignment team, with Alex Cloud (Anthropic) serving as co-mentor. Core early members included Quintin Pope, David Udell, and Michael Einhorn. Team Shard's research agenda involves three tracks: formalizing and experimentally testing shard theory's predictions about learned values; building interpretability tools to study how values are encoded in neural networks; and developing practical techniques to influence or constrain the values that emerge during training. The group has produced notable empirical work, including early research on activation steering vectors for language models, gradient routing as a form of weak supervision, and a NeurIPS 2025 spotlight paper on distillation as a method for robustifying unlearning. Former mentees have gone on to positions at Anthropic, MIRI, and Redwood Research. Team Shard is not an incorporated nonprofit and has no independent budget or fiscal sponsorship. Scholars are funded through the MATS program, and Turner and Cloud are employed by their respective organizations. Turner's personal website (turntrout.com) serves as the primary hub for shard theory writing and Team Shard information.