OpenAI's former Head of Policy Research Miles Brundage announces AVERI, a nonprofit aimed at advocating the idea of external audits for frontier AI models
Former OpenAI policy chief Miles Brundage, who has just founded a new nonprofit institute called AVERI that is advocating …
FortuneJeremy Kahn
Context & Ripple Effects
AVERI extends Miles Brundage’s public intervention in AI-safety debates after his earlier criticism of OpenAI’s account of its safety history. It creates a dedicated nonprofit vehicle around a specific governance mechanism—independent assessment of frontier models—rather than a general call for caution.
The move lands as AI policy advocacy is becoming more organized on competing sides: the corpus also tracks a well-funded pro-AI political network backed by prominent technology investors and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. That makes auditability a more concrete point of institutional contest.
First-order effects
AVERI gives policymakers, researchers, and frontier-model developers a new advocacy organization focused on external audits, potentially concentrating expertise and public arguments around that approach.
For OpenAI and other frontier-model builders, the announcement adds pressure to articulate whether—and on what terms—they would accept independent review; it does not itself impose an audit requirement.
Second-order effects
External audits become a clearer competitive and policy issue: labs that can document evaluation and oversight practices may be better positioned in debates over credible safety commitments.
The group’s narrow mandate can help shift discussion from broad AI-risk claims toward practical questions of auditor independence, access, and what model behavior should be tested.
Third-order effects
If external audits gain backing, frontier AI governance could increasingly rely on recurring third-party assurance rather than companies’ internal safety representations alone.
The wider pattern is a contest over who defines AI oversight: independent nonprofits and stricter-rule advocates on one side, and organized pro-AI political networks on the other.
The trend: Frontier AI governance is institutionalizing around auditable, externally accountable safety practices even as industry-aligned groups organize to shape the rules.
Thrilled to support @Miles_Brundage and the team at https://averi.org/! And co-author their first paper: Frontier AI Auditing: Toward Rigorous Third-Party Assessment of Safety and Security Practices at Leading AI Companies Congratulations on the launch 🚀
This is super important, and is yet another reminder of just how new the entire AI policy space is—auditing and verification is basically just starting despite the (enormous) sums pouring into the space.
There's no good way to be sure, from the outside, that an AI company is taking safety seriously. Are its claims true? How thorough was their testing? Glad that Miles and team are working on a solution, and honored to contribute to the ideas. [image]
This is great to see! I also appreciate the careful language (and clearly careful thought) that's gone into issues of funding and conflict of interests, given the area they're planning to work in. Important.
I'm very excited about AVERI. The framing I've seen seems super sensible and grounded. In hindsight, I think it clearly fills an important gap in the AI ecosystem.
A year ago we at @HalcyonFutures made a grant to @Miles_Brundage to find and launch his Next Big Thing. Today he unveiled @AVERIorg. And he was kind enough to invite me to join the org's board. Congrats Miles!! Honored to be on your team.
Super excited to share that the non-profit I spent last year co-founding (AVERI) just launched🚀 AVERI stands for AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute, and today we published a paper in collaboration with researchers at dozens of orgs. 🧵 https://x.com/...
AVERI's goal is to make third-party auditing of frontier AI effective and universal. Today, together with coauthors at dozens of organizations we set out our vision in “Frontier AI Auditing” — a framework for rigorous third-party audits of safety and security practices at