Straumli

Straumli is an AI safety company founded in 2023 by Paul Bricman (Co-Founder and CEO) and registered in Bucharest, Romania. Its name references the Straumli Realm from Vernor Vinge's science fiction novel A Fire Upon the Deep. The company's core mission is to help AI developers ship safe AI faster through managed auditing and a comprehensive evaluation platform. Straumli's auditing suite includes specialized evaluations for AI misuse risks. Its biowarfare evaluation assesses a model's ability to provide hazardous knowledge related to pathogen modification, and was designed in collaboration with experts in virology, epidemiology, and biotechnology. Its cyberwarfare evaluation tests models against procedurally generated cybersecurity puzzles that require exploiting real vulnerabilities. The platform uses a privacy-preserving method that enables on-premises evaluations without sharing reference answers. Beyond the commercial auditing suite, Straumli conducts research on cryptographic infrastructure for AI governance. Its Hashmarking protocol enables multiple stakeholders — developers, auditors, and domain experts — to coordinate on creating and administering QA-style capability benchmarks without sharing reference solutions outright, making the protocol especially relevant for managing dual-use capability assessments. Other research directions include the Responsible Pioneer Protocol (allowing AI labs to assess relative capability progress without disclosing absolute metrics), Neural Certificate Authorities (tamper-evident evaluation certificates), and Cognitive Kill Switch (meta-learning-based approaches to make safety guardrails fine-tuning-resistant). In May 2024, Open Philanthropy awarded Straumli a $400,000 grant to develop a benchmark for the cyberoffense capabilities of large language model agents, as part of Open Philanthropy's focus on potential risks from advanced AI. Straumli has also donated prize funding for AI governance hackathons within the EA community.