Alignment Research Ecosystem — MATS, Redwood, Apollo, METR

Five organisations define the 2026 non-lab alignment research layer. MATS (ML Alignment & Theory Scholars): 527+ researchers since late 2021, 180+ papers, 10K+ citations, h-index 47; summer 2024 cohort incorporated as 501(c)(3) with ~90 scholars and 40 mentors; 80% of pre-2025 alumni work on safety/security with 200+ at Anthropic, DeepMind, OpenAI, UK AISI, RAND, Redwood, METR, Apollo. Redwood Research: applied alignment lab founded by Buck Shlegeris; introduced AI Control (Lesson 10); collaborates with UK AISI on control safety cases. Apollo Research: pre-deployment scheming evaluations for frontier labs; authored In-Context Scheming (Lesson 8) and Towards Safety Cases for AI Scheming. METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research): task-based capability evaluations, autonomous-task time-horizon studies; "Common Elements of Frontier AI Safety Policies" compares lab frameworks. Eleos AI Research: model-welfare pre-deployment evaluations (Lesson 19); conducted Claude Opus 4 welfare assessment.

Prerequisites: Phase 18 · 01-27 (prior Phase 18 lessons)