AI Alignment Foundation (AIAF)

The AI Alignment Foundation (AIAF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Marina Del Rey, California, that funds, accelerates, and advocates for research aimed at making AI systems genuinely trustworthy. The foundation was granted tax-exempt status in May 2024 and is closely affiliated with AE Studio, a technology studio founded by Judd Rosenblatt that serves as AIAF's founding partner and primary research engine. AIAF operates through three core activities: identifying and funding visionary researchers pursuing underexplored alignment approaches; providing those researchers with dedicated engineering teams, compute resources, and infrastructure to accelerate their work from concept to publication; and advocating at the policy level by bringing alignment research to defense agencies such as DARPA and to government leadership. The foundation's research agenda, carried out largely through AE Studio's alignment team, spans technical interpretability, AI self-modeling, and consciousness-related approaches. Published research areas include self-interpretation adapters (enabling models to describe their own internal processes), steering resistance (how AI systems maintain coherent behavior when redirected), neural empathy techniques (applying shared neural space representations to reduce deceptive behavior), and harmless refusals analysis. Collaborations have involved researchers at Anthropic and Princeton. Leadership includes Judd Rosenblatt as President, Zeke Reffe-Hogan as Lead Operations, and Noah Maier as Lead Development. Officers listed in IRS filings include Sarah Stern (Treasurer), John Ela (Secretary), and Doug Lorenzen (Controller). The organization appears to operate under a dual-brand structure, sharing its EIN (93-3967552) and address with the Flourishing Future Foundation, which describes an identical mission of empowering alignment researchers through engineering support and neglected approaches. Financially, AIAF is very early-stage. Its 990-EZ filings show $60,000 in revenue for 2023 (its first year) and near-zero activity in 2024, with total net assets of approximately $58,000. The organization has received press coverage in The Wall Street Journal and CNN and has been featured on The Cognitive Revolution podcast.