Chris Lakin

San Francisco, CA

Bio

Updated 03/22/26

Chris Lakin is an independent AI safety researcher and writer based in San Francisco. He studied physics at Carnegie Mellon University and previously contributed to New Science, a metascience non-profit. His primary research focus is formalizing the concept of "boundaries" or "membranes" as a rigorous safety specification for AI systems, drawing on Markov blankets and connections to agent autonomy in psychology. He has written widely-read distillation posts on this topic for LessWrong and the Alignment Forum, and organized two workshops: the Conceptual Boundaries Workshop (February 2024, Austin) and the Mathematical Boundaries Workshop (April 2024, Berkeley area), bringing together researchers including David Dalrymple, Scott Garrabrant, and Andrew Critch. His work has been funded by the Long-Term Future Fund, the Foresight Institute, and a joint $40,000 ACX Grant (2024) with Evan Miyazono. He writes the "Locally Optimal" Substack newsletter (3,300+ subscribers) and maintains a project site at formalizingboundaries.ai.