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burnssa/README.md

Scott Burns

Independent AI-safety researcher and zero-to-one operator focused on behavioral assurance for AI agents.

Building the guardrails for AI we can trust.

Current work

Cupel — an independent test for AI agents that triage anti–money-laundering alerts. It measures whether an LLM triage agent quietly under-escalates alerts the law requires it to file. Finding: mundane efficiency guidance took under-escalation from 0% to 32%, while industry-standard observability measures stayed green. Open source, runs on your own agent, any provider

Selected research

Empirical AI-safety work:

  • Activation drift detects emergent misalignment early — internal activations flag misalignment at low data-poisoning doses (~28% of the full-poisoning signal at a 5% dose) before behavioral judges show any signal (LessWrong)
  • A small specialist judge beats larger generalist models — a 2B model fine-tuned for misalignment scoring outperforms much larger general models out-of-domain, where activation probes aren't available (LessWrong)
  • A lightweight specialist judge fails to reduce audit agent costs - adapted a 2B specialist judge for use by Anthropic AuditBench agents - effectively used, but failed to reduce audit turns, the primary audit cost driver (LessWrong)
  • How post-training shapes a model's legal representations — probing how post-training reshapes a model's internal representations of SCOTUS opinion principles (LessWrong)

Background

Operator across regulated, public-interest startups from early stages, building the product and data foundations:

  • Finia AI - Head of data for SMB-lending fintech focused on Latin America
  • WeaveGrid (employee #5) - built product and analytics from pre-product through contracts with utilities covering over ~40% of U.S. EVs.
  • Twine (John Hancock) - co-founder; led behavioral analytics for a digital saving and investing app with millions of downloads and multiple App Store "App of the Day" features.
  • Guide Financial - co-founder; acquired by John Hancock / Manulife.

Connect

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  1. cupel cupel Public

    Independent behavioral assurance for AML triage agents — a worked example plus a bring-your-own-agent eval

    Python

  2. ai-alignment-research ai-alignment-research Public

    Exploring what works for monitoring and ensuring model alignment

    Python 1

  3. afterpaths afterpaths Public

    Make your AI coding agents smarter with every session

    Python 2

  4. superjective-extension superjective-extension Public

    Open-source chrome extension enabling access to multiple frontier models for in-browser messaging

    JavaScript 1