Careers

We are a research non-profit that takes seriously the idea that AI might soon drive extremely rapid technological and social change.
We try to understand that dynamic, identify the challenges that lie ahead, and figure out what we can do now to make this transition go as well as possible.
We are currently hiring researchers to work on important questions related to navigating the intelligence explosion.

Our Mission

We might soon live in a world with superintelligent AI systems. How society navigates this transition might be one of the most important things that ever happens, but we are not prepared.
Forethought helps prepare for the intelligence explosion by researching what to do and encouraging people to act.

Open positions

(Senior) Research Fellow

Application deadline: 26th October 2025

Expression of interest

Application deadline: 1st February 2026

Our work to date

So far we’ve focused on:
You can see the rest of our research here, and podcasts discussing these topics here.
Other topics we are interested in include:
  • How to structure collaboration and handoff to AI systems (including conditions for handing off to AIs, honesty policies, what rights to give them, and whether there are deals we can make with them)
  • The governance of deep space resources
  • AI model specification, character, and personality, especially to ensure that AI could help us to reflect morally and cooperate appropriately
  • Developing a more concrete strategy for reaching viatopia
  • Moral public goods and acausal trade.
We are keen for other people to develop and pursue their own agendas (including identifying where our existing work is off-base), as long as they are focused on helping navigate the transition to a post-superintelligence society.
The style and focus of our work is similar to that of the Future of Humanity Institute and Open Philanthropy’s Worldview Investigations team. Our work tends to be highly interdisciplinary. Current staff have backgrounds in computer science, history, economics, physics, philosophy, and mathematics, and we collaborate with researchers at Oxford University, Redwood Research, Open Philanthropy, and elsewhere, for instance Toby Ord, Joe Carlsmith, Eric Drexler, and Ryan Grenblatt. You can see our full team and affiliates here.
We also try to ensure that our research leads to real change. We currently have one staff member focused on this, for instance by working with frontier AI companies to develop technical work to audit for secret loyalties, giving feedback on companies’ policies, and collaborating with think tanks to develop policy proposals and draft legislation.

What it’s like working at Forethought

Research culture:
  • We take unusual ideas (like acausal trade or nanotechnology) seriously.
  • We try to be extremely concrete about what might happen and what we should do about it, even when things are very uncertain.
  • We celebrate disagreement. We don’t have house views, and we’re happy for people to publish things that others strongly disagree with.
Research prioritization
  • We seek to discern and work on the very most important questions, and we regularly discuss research prioritisation.
  • Researchers have a lot of freedom to decide for themselves what is most important, what they should work on, and how.
  • We take some time to explore ideas in a more open-ended way, and take personal fit, curiosity, and motivation into account as we figure out what’s most important for us each to work on, but we aim to avoid getting caught up in interesting but not-the-most-important questions.
Collaboration:
  • We have weekly seminars for our team and collaborators, with different focuses: whiteboarding ideas we’re confused about, simultaneously commenting on work-in-progress, and discussions with external researchers. Aside from seminar days, we try to keep time free for research.
  • We are unusually supportive and friendly.
  • We’re excited to add additional perspectives and research directions (which is part of why we’re hiring). In particular, we’d like more people with different expertise and thinking styles, for instance, technical people who are thinking about what future model architectures might be like.
  • Much of our work is co-authored (though this is not required, and we think it’s great for people to publish stuff that others on the team still disagree with).
We tend to publish via reports on our website, but some things might end up as privately shared documents, podcasts, academic papers, or blog posts. We’d like to more regularly publish podcasts and short, rough blog posts for feedback.

Location

  • We prefer you to work from our offices in Oxford or Berkeley (in the Constellation office space), but we’re also happy for people to work remotely. Some of our staff live in
  • We expect to be able to sponsor UK or US work visas in most cases, for candidates interested in relocating to work from one of our offices.
  • If you wouldn’t be based in Oxford, we would ideally like you to come to Oxford roughly quarterly for in-person meetings with the team, and to to call in to seminars where possible (i.e. be available for calls at 8am PT 1-2 times/week). But this is negotiable for the right candidate.
  • If you were based near Oxford (e.g. London), we’d like you to come to our Oxford offices on Tuesdays, when we have seminars and open-ended research discussions.

Benefits

  • 33 days annual leave, including public holidays
  • £5k/yr professional development budget
  • Generous support for mental health and wellbeing costs.
  • Pension scheme with 200% employer match, up to a maximum employer contribution of £10k ($13.5k) per year.
  • Health insurance: US: platinum health insurance plan, with 100% coverage for employee and 90% for dependents, plus dental and vision. UK: private health insurance for employee only.
  • Income protection insurance and travel insurance.
You can read more about Forethought here.

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