The Center for AI Safety (CAIS), a nonprofit focused on reducing societal-scale risks from artificial intelligence, today announced the appointment of Devin Kim as its President, as well as the establishment of the Frontier Security Institute (FSI), a new Washington, D.C.-based organization that will serve as the translation layer between frontier AI development and the National Security Enterprise. The two announcements represent a major expansion of the organization’s leadership and reach as CAIS grows to meet the urgent safety issues that AI poses across society.
“Today marks a significant moment for CAIS and for the field,” said Dan Hendrycks, Executive Director of CAIS. “Devin’s appointment gives us the operational and technical leadership to match the scale of what we’re building, and the Frontier Security Institute extends our mission into territory that has never been more consequential. Frontier AI is now a national security technology, and the National Security Enterprise needs partners fluent in both worlds. We are building the organization and team that can do that work.”
Devin Kim Appointed President
Kim joins CAIS from xAI, where as an early employee, he led post-training tooling and research infrastructure for Grok models. Before xAI, he was an engineer at Scale AI focused on content understanding and trust and safety systems, collaborating directly with teams at OpenAI and Meta on model performance and safety.
“I have spent my career building the most powerful AI systems in the world and am a firm believer that AI has the potential to profoundly benefit society,” said Kim. “Realizing that potential depends on getting safety right, and CAIS is where that work happens.”
In the newly created role of President, Kim will lead CAIS’s research mission, organizational strategy, and growing engagement across the policy, national security, and AI communities. He will also strengthen the organization’s field-building initiatives, providing the infrastructure and technical resources to the AI safety and research community while expanding opportunities for those new to the industry.
Hendrycks continued, “Devin has built systems at the frontier of AI development, understands the research infrastructure that makes safety work possible, and can translate all of it for audiences outside the technical community. That is exactly the leadership this organization needs as our work expands into new and urgent territory.”
Kim’s appointment comes as CAIS develops critical new research on topics like AI wellbeing and AI political manipulation, and furthers engagement with stakeholders outside of the AI safety community.
Frontier Security Institute
Based in Washington, D.C., FSI will close the capability gap between frontier AI and the National Security Enterprise — the Pentagon, the Intelligence Community, Congress, and allied institutions.
FSI will operate as the translation layer between frontier AI developers and the national security operators who must acquire, govern, and utilize these systems. FSI’s initial work will focus on AI issues that are unique to the national security use case — from securing advanced AI models, to the way operators test and utilize these systems, to how AI is reshaping geopolitical stability.
FSI’s Executive Director, Isaac “Ike” Harris, is a national security practitioner whose career spans the uniformed services, Congress, and the private sector. Harris served 23 years as a U.S. Navy Surface Warfare Officer, including command of USS Ramage (DDG-61), with deployments to Europe and the Middle East. He subsequently served as policy advisor to the Secretary of Defense on China and technology security, as a Senior Professional Staff Member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and as Vice President of Government Strategy at Exiger.
“As the labs race to expand the frontiers of AI capability, the National Security Enterprise risks falling behind,” Harris said. “Bridging the two has never been more critical to American national security or to the future of American innovation.”
Jeremy Pelter joins FSI as Chief Operating Officer. Pelter brings nearly two decades of federal service, including service as Acting United States Secretary of Commerce. Additional senior members of the team include Director of Research Aaron B. Frank, Ph.D., a former RAND researcher and computational social scientist, and Vice President of Communications Susan Malandrino, former senior advisor to the President of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).
About the Center for AI Safety
The Center for AI Safety is a San Francisco-based nonprofit conducting research and advocacy to reduce large-scale risks from advanced artificial intelligence. Through technical research, policy advising, and public engagement, CAIS works to ensure AI is developed safely and aligned with human values. Learn more at safe.ai.
About Frontier Security Institute
Frontier Security Institute at CAIS, is the translation layer between frontier AI and the National Security Enterprise — delivering the research, analysis, and dialogue the Pentagon, Intelligence Community, Congress, and allied institutions need to acquire, govern, and utilize frontier AI.
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