Lee Foster is a threat intelligence expert and AI security researcher with deep expertise in disinformation, influence operations, and AI misuse. He founded and led the Information Operations threat intelligence team at Mandiant/FireEye before co-founding Aspect Labs, a company focused on protecting commercial AI deployments against bias, misuse, and adversarial attacks. In January 2024, he received a $223,000 grant from Open Philanthropy to develop an LLM Misuse Database — a structured resource for tracking and cataloging real-world cases of large language model misuse relevant to AI safety. He also serves as adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins SAIS within the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies.
Funding Details
- Annual Budget
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- Current Runway
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- Funding Goal
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- Funding Raised to Date
- $223,000
- Fiscal Sponsor
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Theory of Change
Foster's work is grounded in the idea that to mitigate AI misuse risks, the field first needs systematic empirical documentation of how LLMs are actually being misused in the real world. By building a comprehensive LLM Misuse Database, he creates a public resource that researchers, policymakers, and AI developers can use to identify patterns, prioritize mitigations, and design safer systems. His background in disinformation and influence operations tracking gives him a threat-intelligence-informed approach: treat AI misuse as an adversarial intelligence problem that requires structured data collection and analysis, similar to how cybersecurity threat intelligence has improved cyber defense.
Grants Received
from Open Philanthropy
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Details
- Last Updated
- Apr 2, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC
- Created
- Mar 20, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC