According to Cleo Nardo on LessWrong, independent researchers working outside frontier AI labs—the AI safety community beyond OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind—will be crucial to ensuring advanced AI systems don't go wrong. These outsiders provide external checks on lab reasoning, develop safety techniques that can be adopted broadly, advise governments, and maintain rigorous epistemic standards in an otherwise insular environment. Nardo argues that while insiders may become increasingly important as development accelerates, outsiders currently outperform any individual lab in their collective contributions to AI safety. Key priorities include ensuring outsiders have access to resources like compute, funding, and model access; focusing research on durable topics like AI epistemics and control methods; and preserving credibility and intellectual independence as the strategic landscape shifts.

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