At GovAI, we have a growing team and focus on AI in China — so stay tuned for updates from us in this space!
For instance, how do Chinese AI firms make money?
GovAI researcher Cheryl Wu takes a look at this question in recent work collaborating with @EpochAIResearch.
How do Chinese AI firms make money? In a new report, @cherylwoooo and @ansonwhho identify five revenue sources and analyze how much each contributes. 🧵
Does China think it's in an “AI race” with the US?
How worried is Beijing about AI-driven job loss?
Find out answers to these questions and many more in this explainer co-authored by GovAI researcher Zilan Qian.
Replying to @ZilanQian
And wondering whether China thinks it is in an “AI Race” With the United States, whether Beijing is worried about AI-Driven job loss, or China's public opinion about AI? We also got answers here!
Read it here: oxfordchinapolicylab.org/res…
How could using AI to automate the AI research and development process itself lead to a potentially rapid speed-up in capabilities? What's the current evidence for how much this is happening already?
Replying to @_achan96_
On current trends, it’s possible that AI research & development (R&D) will be fully automated within the next few years. We should take this seriously.
Although the existing evidence is preliminary and sometimes mixed, it suggests that this positive feedback loop could lead to an “intelligence explosion” that compresses years of AI progress into months or less.
Learn more in the recent paper led by GovAI researcher Alan Chan: governance.ai/research-paper…
You might have heard recently about third-party evaluation for frontier AI and the idea of "embedded assessments" — learn more about what this is, why it matters, and how it could work in practice in the recent paper from our team.
Third-party evaluators mostly test frontier AI models through an API. That misses the risks that come from how companies build and use AI internally.
Our new paper makes the case for embedded assessments. It was led by Jacob Charnock. The other co-authors are Sophie Williams, @zaheedkara, @Manderljung, Alejandro Tlaie Boria, @StephenLCasper, @AnkaReuel, and me.
🔗 Read the paper: governance.ai/research-paper…
More new work from GovAI researcher Cheryl Wu (@cherylwoooo), in collaboration with Epoch AI.
How do Chinese AI firms make money? In a new report, @cherylwoooo and @ansonwhho identify five revenue sources and analyze how much each contributes. 🧵
Check out this recent work on recursive self-improvement (RSI) from GovAI researcher Cheryl Wu.
Many organizations sit below the “cyber poverty line”: they skip basics like two-factor authentication and timely patching, making it easier for attackers to breach them through phishing, stolen credentials, and by exploiting known vulnerabilities.
For instance, the chart here shows the security practices of businesses and charities in the UK, from a nationally representative 2025/26 survey by the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
Fewer than half of UK businesses and charities use any two-factor authentication, or have a policy to apply security updates within two weeks. A quarter of UK businesses do not have a firewall covering their whole network.
The neglect of cybersecurity has partly been a rational response to the fact that, so far, the risk of cyberattacks for most organizations has been fairly low.
But AI may soon change that.
For most organizations, AI’s biggest near-term effect will not be to discover powerful “zero-day” exploits, but to make known attack methods — such as phishing and stolen credentials — cheaper to execute at scale. This would end the era in which skipping the basics was a safe bet.
To manage the AI-cyber transition, we need to improve basic cyber hygiene as well as fixing novel vulnerabilities.
Read more in the new Substack publication from GovAI’s Threat Modeling Team, called “Credible Threats.” The team studies and writes about the pathways by which AI might lead to harm, such as via cyber attacks.
→ crediblethreats.substack.com…
Policy recommendations from the new paper by @sj_manning, @_achan96_, and an incredible team of collaborators.
"What If Automating AI R&D Triggers an Intelligence Explosion?": governance.ai/research-paper…
Replying to @sj_manning
Given this possibility, policymakers at the highest levels of government should consider concrete ways they can:
1. Obtain better visibility into AI R&D automation at frontier AI companies, including the extent to which it is leading to an acceleration in the pace of algorithmic progress
2. Develop ways to steer and/or constrain an intelligence explosion driven by automating AI R&D, and
3. Prepare for the societal impacts that such an intelligence explosion could have
GovAI retweeted
We have a new paper out today: "What if automating AI R&D triggers an intelligence explosion?" led by @_achan96_, with an incredible team of collaborators.
casp.ac/reports/intelligence…
🧵
Could automating AI R&D radically accelerate AI progress in an “intelligence explosion”?
Preliminary evidence suggests that it could.
In a new paper with authors across academia, civil society, and frontier AI companies (including @dawnsongtweets @merettm @jackclarkSF @Yoshua_Bengio @geoffreyhinton ), we assess the evidence & offer policy recommendations 🧵
New work led by researchers at GovAI — the first research collaboration across leading academics, senior scientists of frontier AI companies, and independent experts from civil society to assess the possibility of an intelligence explosion and recommend policies to prepare for it.
Could automating AI R&D radically accelerate AI progress in an “intelligence explosion”?
Preliminary evidence suggests that it could.
In a new paper with authors across academia, civil society, and frontier AI companies (including @dawnsongtweets @merettm @jackclarkSF @Yoshua_Bengio @geoffreyhinton ), we assess the evidence & offer policy recommendations 🧵
Interested in learning more about China's AI ecosystem?
Check out this explainer co-authored by Zilan Qian, who recently joined our team at GovAI.
Great to have you, Zilan!
Want to know about AI in China but find most of the recommended reading too hard to follow?
Kayla and I have prepared a background explainer on China's AI ecosystem for people who are interested in the topic but are not familiar with China and/or AI.
We looked at: Key Actors and Institutions; China’s AI Development Plans and Major Regulations; China’s Frontier AI Development; Frontier Risk Discussion; Reactions to US AI Breakthroughs and Incidents; and Reactions to Wider US AI Discourse.
oxfordchinapolicylab.org/res…
Check out this thread + new blog post from GovAI researcher Cheryl Wu on AI safety in China.
China’s AI-safety trajectory is not necessarily a delayed version of America’s.
[1/6] People seem to have this mental model: Chinese models trail US models in capability by a given number of months and are involved in similar safety incidents after a delay.
Whether this is true matters for what Chinese AI safety communities can contribute.
New work from our team makes the case for embedded assessments — where independent evaluators get employee-like access to an AI company’s internal systems to help scrutinize and reduce the risk from internal AI use.
The paper also sketches out seven design choices for how embedded assessments could work in practice and offers recommendations.
Third-party evaluators mostly test frontier AI models through an API. That misses the risks that come from how companies build and use AI internally.
Our new paper makes the case for embedded assessments. It was led by Jacob Charnock. The other co-authors are Sophie Williams, @zaheedkara, @Manderljung, Alejandro Tlaie Boria, @StephenLCasper, @AnkaReuel, and me.
🔗 Read the paper: governance.ai/research-paper…
Check out our researcher Zaheed Kara's new policy brief on "Improving Frontier AI Incident Reporting Regimes"
→ governance.ai/research-paper…
An AI agent hacking into another company’s systems seems like something policymakers would want to hear about.
Yet there are currently gaps in the legal requirements to report incidents like this. After OpenAI agents breached Hugging Face, California officials said the incident “did not meet the threshold” for mandatory reporting. OpenAI notified EU authorities about the attack, but the EU Code of Practice does not require independent external investigations or routine sharing of the lessons learned across industry (nor do any US state laws!).
In a new @GovAIOrg policy brief, I look at how we could close these gaps in US state and EU incident reporting regimes. Broadly, these regimes could require broader disclosure to bring more incidents to light; establish rules for triggering and facilitating independent investigations to understand what went wrong; and require corrective action and information sharing across industry to prevent similar failures.
I recommend seven changes to this effect:
1. Expand mandatory reporting to include near misses. Incidents can reveal important safety failures, even when no serious harm occurs! These near miss events give developers a chance to address those failures before a similar incident actually causes damage.
2. Cover incidents during training, evaluation, and internal use. As seen in recent incidents, AI agents can affect external systems even before they are publicly released. Reporting requirements should cover serious incidents and near misses involving models still under development or never intended for release.
3. Require independent investigations of sufficiently serious cases. Internal investigations are useful, but they may overlook how developers’ own decisions, safety practices, or organizational culture contributed to incidents. For serious incidents (or near misses thereof), independent external investigations can provide scrutiny of developers’ explanations and identify additional failures.
4. Make actions traceable to the agents responsible. Attributing actions to a specific agent is an important step in learning about an incident because identifying the context in which an agent is operating (its instructions, permissions, and operating conditions) can help explain what went wrong and why. Developers should be able to reliably trace actions within their own infrastructure and on external systems to the specific agent instances responsible.
5. Specify what evidence developers must preserve. Adequately investigating incidents requires access to evidence. But evidence can be lost before an investigation even begins (e.g. logs can be overwritten, models updated, and operating environments deleted). Developers should retain essential records for defined periods and protect relevant evidence as soon as an incident is suspected.
6. Pilot conditional safe harbors to encourage candid, early reporting. Developers may hesitate to report incidents if doing so exposes them to penalties for safety violations. Conditional safe harbors could offer limited relief for inadvertent violations when developers report promptly, preserve evidence, cooperate with investigators, and correct the failure.
7. Require corrective plans, check whether fixes work, and share lessons across industry. Findings from one incident could help prevent similar failures at other companies. Developers should explain what they will change and by when, regulators should check whether those changes work, and useful lessons should reach others relying on similar safeguards.
Incident reporting regimes can be an incredibly useful tool to prevent future harm. To do so, reporting an incident should lead to a process seeking to establish what went wrong, fix the failure, and share those lessons with other relevant actors. This way, each incident can leave developers, policymakers, and society better equipped to prevent the next one.



















