UPenn AI Safety ASSET Student Seminar
Technical AI Safety · Summer 2026 · University of Pennsylvania
Logistics
- When: Wednesdays, 12:00–1:15 PM ET
- Where: Amy Gutmann Hall (AGH) 615 — in person encouraged. Zoom option available, link shared via mailing list.
- Lunch: provided each week (usually New Delhi, occasionally El Merkury).
- Organizers: Berkan Ottlik and Davis Brown.
- Join / suggest a topic: sign up for the mailing list.
About
The UPenn AI Safety ASSET Student Seminar is a student-run seminar on technical AI safety, graciously hosted at Penn and funded by the ASSET center. We read papers together and invite guest speakers from Penn, other universities, AI safety organizations, and AI labs.
Anyone excited to learn about AI safety is welcome — we ask only for some background in machine learning, roughly equivalent to an introductory course. Over the summer, topics span deceptive alignment, monitoring and AI control, open-weights safeguards, mechanistic interpretability, model motivations, multi-agent safety, subliminal learning, backdoors, and AI governance.
Schedule — Summer 2026
| Date | Speaker | Affiliation | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 20 | Berkan Ottlik | UPenn | Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model |
| May 27 | Davis Brown | UPenn | Current AIs seem pretty misaligned to me & Finding Widespread Cheating on Popular Agent Benchmarks |
| Jun 3 | Canceled | ||
| Jun 10 | Canceled | ||
| Jun 17 | Chloe Li | Anthropic Alignment Fellow | Model spec midtraining |
| Jun 24 | TBD | ||
| Jul 1 | Daniel Tan | Arcadia Alignment (UK AISI) | Emergent misalignment & model motivations |
| Jul 8 | Skipping — ICML | ||
| Jul 15 | Peter Hase | Schmidt Sciences / Stanford | Interpretability & controllability |
| Jul 22 | Meena Jagadeesan | UC Berkeley (incoming UPenn) | Multi-agent ML ecosystems & safety |
| Jul 29 | Matan Shtepel | CMU | AI safety |
| Aug 5 | Stephen Casper | Harvard (Berkman Klein) | AI Governance in 2026 |
Talk details
Stephen Casper — AI Governance in 2026 (Aug 5)
What’s going on, why it’s a mess, and why it’s going to get messier.
Emerging technologies are always hard to govern, especially when their onset is crammed into a few intense years. With AI, policymakers, thus far, have produced more case studies in failure than success. This talk will overview the stages of governing emerging tech, the challenges that are arising, and the diverse policy strategies that governments across the world are taking. Finally, we will speculate about how things may change in the next few years and how governments will need to adapt. We will speculate about how Xi Jinping, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Bernie Sanders, and anonymous hackers may all have the potential power to “blow it up” and usher in the next messy chapter of AI governance.
Inspired by the formatting of the FOLDS Seminar.