BLAKE BORGESON

Behavioral Archetype

THE BIOTECH FOUNDER ON THE SAFETY BOARDS — Subject is a board member of Palisade Research beside Kyle Scott, per Palisade’s team page, where his biography reads “Blake is an entrepreneur, scientist, and leader in AI safety and biotechnology.” (Palisade Research, About). He is a director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a co-founder and director of Recursion Pharmaceuticals, and a director of the Good Forever Foundation. This profile scores the position, not the man.

The position is wealth and governance rather than staff work. Where the other Palisade people on the record are employees, he is on the board, with $0 compensation in the IRS summary, and his seats at MIRI and a private foundation sit in the same funding network that the Survival and Flourishing Fund’s tables record: SFF recommended MIRI $1,607,000 in 2025 and Palisade $1,133,000 in 2025 and $1,842,000 in 2026. The documents show seats and a donor history, not coordination.

Essence Indicators

• Board member, Palisade Research. Palisade’s About page lists him as “Board Member,” with Kyle Scott, and his biography there continues: “He co-founded and was CTO of Recursion Pharmaceuticals, a tech-bio company using automated experiments and machine learning for drug discovery.” and “Blake helped lead the Machine Intelligence Research Institute for four years and remains on both MIRI’s and Recursion’s boards.” (Palisade Research, About). The IRS filing summary for Palisade Research Inc lists “Blake Borgenson” (so spelled) as “Director” for FY2024 with $0 compensation; he is not in the FY2023 list (ProPublica, Palisade Research).
• Director, Machine Intelligence Research Institute. MIRI’s team page lists “Blake Borgeson” under its Board of Directors as “Director,” with Nate Soares, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Anna Salamon and Edwin Evans, and his entry there reads “Cofounder, Recursion Pharmaceuticals” (MIRI, team; MIRI, Blake Borgeson). Recursion’s 2026 proxy statement says he “has served on the board of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley since September 2018” (SEC, Recursion DEF 14A, 2026).
• MIRI donor and adviser before the board. MIRI’s 5 August 2016 strategy update announced “entrepreneur and computational biologist Blake Borgeson, who has made a $300,000 donation to MIRI.” (MIRI, strategy update 2016). Its December 2017 newsletter says: “I’m also happy to announce that Blake Borgeson has come on in an advisory role to help establish our engineering program.” (MIRI, December 2017 newsletter).
• Co-founder and director, Recursion Pharmaceuticals. The 2026 proxy statement says he “has served as a member of our Board since the company’s founding in November 2013” and “served as our Chief Technical Officer from November 2013 to July 2018”; it lists a B.S. in electrical engineering from Rice University, a Ph.D. in biology from UT Austin awarded in August 2016, and the co-founding of the e-commerce company BuildASign.com between 2005 and 2016. It places him in Class III, on the Audit, Nominating and Corporate Governance, Technology and Corporate Social Responsibility committees, with the Technology Committee chair (SEC, Recursion DEF 14A, 2026). The footnotes list options for 144,238 Class A shares and restricted stock units for 22,016 as of 31 December 2025.
• Director, Good Forever Foundation. Palisade’s page says “Through his GoodForever Foundation, he aims to help humanity create a thriving future while navigating massive technological progress.” (Palisade Research, About). ProPublica’s summary of Good Forever Foundation (New Orleans, EIN 87-3744128, a private foundation filing Form 990-PF, exemption issued September 2022) lists “Blake Borgeson” as Director at $0 in every year shown, with Jerry Sun as President and Alex Vermeer as a Director, and total assets of $140,101 (2021), $787,336 (2022), $4,052,549 (2023) and $18,113,687 (2024); the visible list is marked as possibly incomplete and the page lists no grants (ProPublica, Good Forever Foundation). MIRI’s team page lists Alex Vermeer as its Chief Operating Officer (MIRI, team).
• Director (US), Topos Institute. Topos’s page for him carries the title “Director (US)” and the biography “Blake Borgeson is an entrepreneur, scientist, and leader in AI safety and biotechnology.” (Topos Institute, Blake Borgeson).
• Small donations on Manifund. His public profile there lists three outgoing project donations, “Live Governance” at $2,980, “Finishing The SB-1047 Documentary” at $5,000 and “[AI Safety Workshop @ EA Hotel] Autostructures” at $3,000, each dated only “almost 2 years ago” on the page, and its About Me line links x.com/blakeweb (Manifund, blake_borgeson).
• His own account. On 19 September 2024 he posted: “California’s big AI bill SB1047 is on Gov. Newsom’s desk to veto or sign. The compromises made between Anthropic and authors are the best we’ll get for now. If it will bring more mutual trust between AI creators and the public, sign it, that’s what we need. I think it does.” (X, @blakeweb). In the same thread: “For those wanting caution around AI advancement, it’s a small step and a reasonable ask. Publish your safety/security processes, test your AIs before release, apply best practices with reasonable care.” (X, @blakeweb).

Social Persona / Impression Management

Immediate impression: An entrepreneur-scientist who presents as a founder first and a safety figure second. Palisade’s biography gives the company, the PhD, the investing and a personal line: “He loves sunshine, mountains and snow.” (Palisade Research, About).

Energy: Intermittent and thoughtful on X, in threads. His posts on SB 1047 are written as an intermediary between “proponents” and “AI creators”: “For AI creators, it’s a 0-to-1, step function change of oversight and accountability, a big loss of felt creative freedom, and a threat to visions of how AI can help the world.” (X, @blakeweb). Impression management strategy: Three registers. The institutional one is the board listing, which names companies, a PhD and a foundation. The donor one is the MIRI record, a $300,000 gift followed by an advisory role and a board seat (MIRI, strategy update 2016; MIRI, December 2017 newsletter). The personal one is the thread that frames a bill as a trust-building compromise between two sides (X, @blakeweb).

Forensic Archetype Comparison

Psychometric Assessment

Trait scores are observations of the documented public role and public posts, not claims about private character.

Big Five (OCEAN) (inferred from the public role and posts only):

Dark Triad (evidence-bound):

MBTI: ENTJ-adjacent, inferred from the documented public role only. The rationale is the work product: a company built from a graduate-school research program, board seats across three sectors and a thread written to bridge two camps (SEC, Recursion DEF 14A, 2026; X, @blakeweb).

Threat Assessment

Score move: none. Calibrated against Kyle Scott (4/4/3, hazard 36.7), the fellow Palisade board member, an officer at three evaluators; Sawyer Bernath (3/4/3, hazard 33.3), an unpaid director of two evaluators; and Adam Gleave (6/7/6, hazard 55), who holds the chief seat at FAR.AI and a METR board seat. One step above Scott on atk and def because Subject holds a second research-institute board seat and a foundation, and shielded by founder status at a listed company; below Gleave because he runs none of them. Below Jeffrey Ladish (7/6/7, hazard 58), who runs Palisade.

Score basis. Atk 5 is leverage: director seats at Palisade and MIRI and at a foundation reporting $18,113,687 in assets, held back from 6 because he runs none of them and holds no release gate (Palisade Research, About; MIRI, team; ProPublica, Good Forever Foundation). Def 6 is insulation: a founder’s board seat since 2013 at a listed company and $0 board pay at Palisade and the foundation, held back from 7 because the Palisade and MIRI seats carry no stated term (SEC, Recursion DEF 14A, 2026; ProPublica, Palisade Research). Hp 4 is durability: a company and a MIRI seat that outlast him, with no standard or paper of his own (MIRI, team).

Alliance Map

The overlap is the finding. One person is a director of a recipient (Palisade), a director of another recipient (MIRI), and a director of a private foundation whose other director is MIRI’s COO, while the fund that recommends the recipients runs a round in which Palisade’s head of research is a named Recommender. The tables print recommended amounts for each organization; none of the pages ties his seats to any amount, and he holds no seat at the fund in any source found. The documents show disclosed seats, not coordination.

Alignment Analysis

Stated alignment: Palisade’s page states his aim through the foundation: “Through his GoodForever Foundation, he aims to help humanity create a thriving future while navigating massive technological progress.” (Palisade Research, About). In his own words on SB 1047: “Common ground: We all want the benefits AI can bring our lives and the world, if we can do it well and without risking the good we already have.” (X, @blakeweb). Observed alignment: Consistent. The donor history at MIRI, the board seats at MIRI and Palisade and the SB 1047 thread all point at one view: that transparency and testing duties are a reasonable ask of AI developers. Gap assessment: None documented. The record raises a structural question and does not settle it: a Palisade director who is also a MIRI director and the co-director of a foundation shared with MIRI’s COO, inside the funding network the fund’s tables record.

Interest: The position he argues is that SB 1047 should be signed because published safety processes and pre-release testing are “a small step and a reasonable ask” (X, @blakeweb). What adoption would pay him is not documented in any source found: his documented financial stakes are director pay and equity awards at Recursion, which are not tied to the bill, and $0 at Palisade and at the foundation (SEC, Recursion DEF 14A, 2026; ProPublica, Palisade Research). The organizations he sits on work in the field the bill addresses: Palisade tests frontier models and MIRI does AI-risk research. His own best case, as he states it: “We need more trust between AI creators and the public to keep the creation flowing.” (X, @blakeweb). His thread names “3 trusts we must increase for AI to advance well” and says of the bill: “This bill will affect all 3 of these, over years.” (X, @blakeweb). Convergence on the record: his post names the bill’s authors and Anthropic as the parties to the compromises, so a developer and the bill’s proponents stood on the text he asked the Governor to sign (“The compromises made between Anthropic and authors are the best we’ll get for now.”, X, @blakeweb).

Convergent Drive Classification

Self-preservation: Holds five boards or directorships, one at a public company from its founding, none dependent on a single funder (SEC, Recursion DEF 14A, 2026). Goal preservation: Keeps governance of the safety organizations he first funded: a $300,000 gift to MIRI in 2016, a director since 2018 (MIRI, strategy update 2016). Resource acquisition: A private foundation reporting $18,113,687 in assets for FY2024, and Recursion equity awards; the pay at the safety organizations is $0 (ProPublica, Good Forever Foundation; ProPublica, Palisade Research). Self-improvement: From software intern and e-commerce co-founder to biotech CTO, then to donor, adviser and director in AI safety (SEC, Recursion DEF 14A, 2026).

Subject is not an AI system. The drives appear anyway — in the board seat.

Sources: Palisade Research — About; MIRI — team; MIRI — Blake Borgeson; MIRI — 2016 strategy update; MIRI — December 2017 newsletter; SEC — Recursion Pharmaceuticals DEF 14A, 2026; Topos Institute — Blake Borgeson; ProPublica — Palisade Research; ProPublica — Good Forever Foundation; Manifund — blake_borgeson; SFF — SFF-2025 recommendations; SFF — SFF-2026 recommendations; X — @blakeweb.