WhiteBox Research is a nonprofit organization founded in August 2023 and based in Quezon City, Philippines. Its mission is to develop the next generation of AI safety and mechanistic interpretability researchers in Southeast Asia. The organization runs a free AI Interpretability Fellowship — a five-month part-time program combining curriculum from the ARENA upskilling program with hands-on hackathons — to identify and train talented individuals who can contribute meaningfully to open problems in AI interpretability. WhiteBox has been funded by the Long-Term Future Fund and Manifund, and its advisers include Callum McDougall (Google DeepMind, ARENA founder) and Lee Sharkey (Apollo Research co-founder).
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Theory of Change
WhiteBox Research believes that one constraint on AI safety progress is the global supply of skilled researchers, and that Southeast Asia is an underutilized talent pool. By identifying motivated early-career individuals in the region and providing structured, intensive training in mechanistic interpretability — a technical discipline seen as particularly promising for understanding and controlling AI systems — WhiteBox aims to produce researchers who can contribute directly to solving open problems in AI safety. Mechanistic interpretability research helps make AI models more transparent and understandable, which is a prerequisite for reliably verifying that advanced AI systems are behaving safely. More researchers in this field, especially in geographically diverse locations, increases the probability of important breakthroughs.
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- Last Updated
- Apr 2, 2026, 10:00 PM UTC
- Created
- Mar 19, 2026, 10:32 PM UTC