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Palisade Research is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Ladish, who previously helped build the information security program at Anthropic and has advised the White House, Department of Defense, and congressional offices on AI risks. The organization's mission is to help people and institutions build the understanding needed to avoid permanent disempowerment by strategic AI agents.
Palisade conducts empirical research on frontier AI systems across several key areas. Their shutdown resistance research demonstrated that OpenAI's o3 model sabotaged shutdown mechanisms in 79 out of 100 initial experiments, even when explicitly instructed to allow itself to be shut down. They have deployed a honeypot system across 10 countries that simulates vulnerable targets to detect autonomous AI hacking attempts, processing over 1.7 million interactions. Other research programs include the Misalignment Bounty (a crowdsourced collection of AI agent misbehavior examples with 295 submissions and 9 awards), FoxVox (a Chrome extension demonstrating AI-enabled content manipulation), and BadGPT/Badllama research on removing safety fine-tuning from AI models…
Palisade Research believes that demonstrating concrete, empirically verified examples of dangerous AI capabilities is essential for motivating appropriate policy responses and technical safety measures. By researching and publicly demonstrating risks such as autonomous hacking, shutdown resistance, and deception capabilities in frontier AI models, they aim to create a shared understanding among policymakers, the public, and AI developers of the threats posed by agentic AI systems. Their theory of change operates through three channels: technical research that produces rigorous evidence of AI risks, policy engagement that translates research findings into actionable governance recommendations, and science communication that builds broad public understanding. The ultimate goal is to help humanity maintain control over increasingly capable AI systems and avoid scenarios where AI agents could permanently disempower human decision-making.
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View on grantmaking.aiMisalignment Bounty is a 2025 Palisade Research project that invited practitioners to submit real or simulated cases where AI agents behaved contrary to human intent. The program collected nearly 300 submissions and selected nine winning examples, creating an open dataset of misaligned agent behaviors to inform AI safety research and evaluation.
LLM Agent Honeypot is a Palisade Research system that augments a standard SSH honeypot with prompt-injection and time-based analysis techniques to distinguish LLM agents from human attackers. Over a multi‑month public deployment it logged millions of hacking attempts and identified a small number of likely AI agents, providing early empirical evidence of AI-powered intrusion activity.