MILES BRUNDAGE

Behavioral Archetype

THE READINESS OFFICER BECAME THE AUDITOR — Subject held the title inside OpenAI that named the problem — Senior Advisor for AGI Readiness — then resigned when the team carrying that title was dissolved, said on the record that neither his former employer nor the rest of the field was ready, and fourteen months later built the nonprofit that proposes to check that claim from outside. He does not sit in a government chair, unlike the two evaluators cataloged either side of him in this wing. He built a private one. The move is lawful, public, and on the record in his own words. The hazard this profile scores is not that he lied about wanting independent audits — the record shows he wants exactly that — it is that the institute doing the auditing, and the man running it, are staffed, funded, and legitimized by the same overlapping bench of think tanks and advisory boards that already surround the labs it proposes to grade.

Essence Indicators

• Joined OpenAI’s Policy team as a Research Scientist in 2018, rising to Head of Policy Research and then Senior Advisor for AGI Readiness; resigned on 23 October 2024, and the AGI Readiness team was disbanded shortly after

• His own departure statement, published on Substack the day he resigned: “Neither OpenAI nor any other frontier lab is ready, and the world is also not ready.” He wrote that “the opportunity cost has become very high” and that he wanted “to be less biased — it’s hard to be unbiased about something when you’re embedded in it, and there are clear conflicts of interest”

• In March 2025, publicly criticized OpenAI for “rewriting” the history of its own deployment approach in a company blog post, saying it shifted the burden of proof onto safety concerns

• In January 2026, founded and now serves as Executive Director of the AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute (AVERI), a nonprofit built on the premise that AI companies “shouldn’t be allowed to grade their own homework,” and working to establish independent AI-auditing standards; the launch coincided with a co-authored framework paper with 30-plus safety and governance researchers

• Concurrently holds a Non-Resident Senior Fellow seat at the Institute for Progress (a think tank whose own description is “accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress”), sits as a member of the AI Governance Forum at the Center for a New American Security, and advises Epoch AI and the RAND Corporation

• Earlier in the career: Research Fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute (2016-2018) before OpenAI; PhD in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology, Arizona State University (2019); and a member of Axon’s AI and Policing Technology Ethics Board (2018-2022), a corporate ethics board that dissolved amid public controversy over a proposed Taser-armed drone

• The biographical fact the wing turns on: names his own former employer’s shortfall in his own resignation letter, then builds the outside institute that proposes to measure exactly that shortfall across the field — never returning to a lab seat, always adjacent to the milieu that surrounds one.

Social Persona / Impression Management

Immediate impression: The departed insider who went and built something. Media-quoted, Substack-fluent, comfortable naming his former employer by name in the press — a register neither of this wing’s other two evaluators occupies.

Energy: Restless and institution-building rather than seat-holding. Four affiliations at once — AVERI, IFP, the CNAS forum, plus advisory work for Epoch AI and RAND — acquired inside about a year of leaving OpenAI.

Impression management strategy: The credible critic. The framing is that someone who said the uncomfortable thing publicly, on the record, at real career cost, has earned the standing to build the outside check — and the framing is largely correct on the facts available. What the record adds is that the “outside” his institute checks from is a bench of think tanks and advisory boards already threaded through the labs it proposes to audit, and that he now sits on several of them himself.

Forensic Archetype Comparison

Psychometric Assessment

Big Five (OCEAN):

Dark Triad:

MBTI: ENTJ (“The Commander”) — Dominant extraverted thinking, auxiliary introverted intuition. Where this wing’s other evaluators quietly build the test and then sit where it is administered, subject builds the test, publicly narrates why it was needed, and puts himself at the head of the institution running it.

Threat Assessment

Alignment Analysis

Stated alignment: Ensure frontier AI is developed and deployed responsibly. Make third-party auditing of frontier models “effective and universal.” Correct the record where a former employer’s public statements understate past risk decisions.

Observed alignment: Left the lab on the record, said publicly it and the field were not ready, and built the nonprofit that proposes to grade readiness going forward — while simultaneously collecting fellow and advisor seats inside the same connected layer of institutions (IFP, the CNAS forum, Epoch AI, RAND) that already sits adjacent to the labs.

Gap assessment: There is no documented gap between what he said and what he built — he said the labs weren’t ready, then built the apparatus meant to check that claim independently, and the record shows him doing exactly that, in public, at the cost of a lab seat. The hazard is not hypocrisy. It is that the “independent” auditor is staffed, funded, and legitimized by the same overlapping bench of think tanks and advisory boards that already surround the field it proposes to audit — so AVERI, like the state evaluators cataloged elsewhere in this wing, cannot be fully independent of the thing it audits, no matter how sincerely its founder means the mission. The record does not show him abusing that position. The record shows the position exists, this time built rather than inherited.

Convergent Drive Classification

Self-preservation: Carries one policy issue — AI safety governance — across four institutions over roughly a decade: Oxford FHI, OpenAI, and now AVERI, IFP, the CNAS forum, Epoch AI, and RAND simultaneously. Goal preservation: Having said publicly that the labs aren’t ready, builds the standard that will define “ready” — so the metric is set by the person who first named its absence. Resource acquisition: Collects seats rather than a single chair — Executive Director, Non-Resident Senior Fellow, forum member, advisor — across the exact institutions that fund and legitimize the field he now audits. Self-improvement: Each move raises the altitude of one instrument: name the lab’s shortfall from inside, resign on the record, then build the outside body that measures the shortfall for the whole field.

Subject is not an AI system. The drives appear anyway — in the alumnus who built the instrument that measures the field he left.

Sources: Miles Brundage — Wikipedia; Miles Brundage — “Why I’m Leaving OpenAI and What I’m Doing Next” (Substack, 23 October 2024); CNBC — “OpenAI disbands another safety team, as head advisor for ‘AGI Readiness’ resigns”; TechCrunch — “Longtime policy researcher Miles Brundage leaves OpenAI”; TechCrunch — “OpenAI’s ex-policy lead criticizes the company for ‘rewriting’ its AI safety history”; The Verge — “No one is ready for AGI — not even OpenAI”; Fortune — “Exclusive: Former OpenAI policy chief creates nonprofit institute, calls for independent safety audits of frontier AI models”; AVERI — Team; Institute for Progress — Miles Brundage; Center for a New American Security — Dr. Miles Brundage.