Project Details
Updated 07/13/26 · Provided via application · VerifiedI would like to formalize some of the existing mathematical content in the field of AI safety. The approach would be to formalize definitions, theorem statements, conjectures without AI assistance, while mostly using AI systems for proofs.
What gets formalized:
Potential mathematical research to be formalized could include the works of John Wentworth, Vanessa Kosoy, LawZero, and some older MIRI stuff (like quantilizers, logical induction). This list is not meant to be exhaustive. If this grant is successful, I will inquire which formalizations people would be interested in.
Who is involved:
I would do the project on my own. I am trained as a mathematician, and have some experience with Lean 4. I also completed MATS.
Concrete output:
The main concrete output would be a public collection of mathematical research snippets in AI safety. A research snippet could be a theorem or conjecture with
the necessary context, or a part of a LessWrong article or research article.
For each research snippet:
- A (human-written) compressed article that just focuses on
definitions and theorem/conjecture statements.
It leaves out proofs, intermediate lemmas, and intuitions.
The article is written in ordinary (human) mathematical language. - If applicable, some brief notes on differences to the source material.
- A (human-written) .lean target file that faithfully follows the compressed article.
The proofs are replaced bysorry(except for trivial proofs).
The .lean files also contain sanity check lemmas, to increase confidence
in the correctness of the definitions.
Some definitions might also be replaced bysorry, if the meaning of the definition
is sufficiently pinned down by other theorems and lemmas in the file. - If applicable, one or more .lean solution files,
mostly filled with AI proofs of the statements in the target file. - One or more config files, to be passed to the Lean Comparator tool (see https://github.com/leanprover/comparator),
to verify that the solution and target file match.
Human readers can gain confidence about correctness by reading
the compressed article and inspecting the lean target file, including
the sanity check lemmas, and (if applicable) running the
Comparator tool on the solution.
Speculative ideas if there is time for more:
- Test how good humans are at spotting malicious formalizations (with or without AI assistance).
- Create a formal bounties program: Create some Lean challenges,
and when someone submits a solution,
check with the Lean Comparator tool whether they match
(and then pay out a bounty). - Come up with my own definitions or conjectures that could be useful in AI safety.
- Human verification of autoresearch results:
If an AI system claims to have made mathematical progress,
ask it to informally describe the results.
Then formalize those manually, and ask AI systems for proofs in Lean.
Theory of Impact
Updated 07/17/26 · By grantmaking.aiI expect AI systems to improve a lot at formally solving mathematical problems, and they are already quite good at Lean. But it is less clear whether we will be able to
trust advanced AI systems to faithfully formalize statements.
Unlike for proofs, we do not have robust tools for that (and I have already observed claude code occasionally changing definitions to make proving a theorem a simpler task). Just having Lean somewhere in your pipeline does not protect you from slop.
The strategy of human-crafted statements is useful when statements are short compared to proofs.
A big benefit of formal verification is the greater adversarial robustness,
and we lose some of it if we just do autoformalization.
Research progress:
The project could contribute to research progress in agent foundations and other theoretical AI safety areas.
For example, by formalizing conjectures, and then later solving these conjectures with a lot of AI compute. Or by providing formalization services to other researchers.
People
Updated 07/17/26 · By grantmaking.aiTeam Member
Discussion
Hi,
I've been working on a similar project in this repo: Formalized Agent Foundations. So far I've formalized Robust Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma (which was pretty short) and Logical Induction (which is much longer, still not 100% done, and your post mentioned explicitly) in Lean. My approach differs from the one you describe in your post, because the statement design has been done by AI agents as well in an amplification/debate style harness where agents audit each other's work for faithfulness before bringing important modeling decisions to me. I think for e.g. Logical Induction, hand-specifying everything as "conjectures" ahead of time would have been nearly impossible, although this approach will probably work well for other target works. I sent you a friend request on Discord if you'd like to coordinate efforts or otherwise discuss.
Hi Felix,
We'd like to fund this for $15k. Logistics:
Did you receive funding from anywhere since submitting this application, or has the funding ask changed for any other reason?
Please confirm your commitment to post quarterly updates on how the project is going
I've been involved in some mathematical alignment projects, and the experience has dimmed my enthusiasm: the modelling decisions involved tend to prune the important parts of the problem. But this may all change with e.g. the high-powered Resolution effort and the token deluge more generally, and I like this project regardless because it pays down research debt and makes the thinness and gaps easier to see.
I hope the other endorsers chime in properly.
Good luck!
Thanks a lot!
1. I did not receive funding since submitting this application, and the funding ask has not changed.