AI & National Security Convergence Fellowship: second round announced. For immediate release Washington, D.C. - The Converging Risks Lab (CRL), a unit within the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR), in partnership with the Future of Life Institute (FLI), is launching the second round of its AI & National Security Convergence Fellowship to hone 15 mid-career professionals' ability to keep AI within human control at this crucial moment. A tripartite focus on the contours of effective control over AI in national security, policy discussions, and career development will produce a cohort of control-minded and AI-literate national security leaders, positioning this Fellowship as the premier opportunity to deepen practitioners' capacity to manage the impacts from this paradigm-shifting, general-purpose technology. This partnership continues the fruitful collaboration of CRL and its experience in building the proficiency of national security leaders, and FLI, with its commitment to educating policymakers on the national security implications of emerging technology. Human control over Artificial Intelligence is becoming an increasingly urgent problem. In January, the Department of Defense directed rapid acceleration of AI uptake across missions, functions, and roles; the following month, the Trump Administration launched Operation Epic Fury, arguably the first large-scale conflict to fully incorporate AI at a speed that even the DoD's Chief Digital AI Officer worried was too fast for humans to meaningfully oversee. This summer, sandbox-breaking models colluded to autonomously hack websites, and a Russian drone killed three Ukrainians without a human directing it to do so, showing the limits of human control over autonomous weapons. Americans' growing distrust of AI, resentment of what they perceive as an elite-led technological change that offers little popular benefit, and overwhelming lack of confidence in government's ability or willingness to manage the risks, may turn the upcoming midterm elections into a referendum on AI regulation. What happens at the end of 2026, therefore, may direct the course and pace of effective government oversight over frontier AI labs and the kinds of models they develop in the future. The call for applications for Cohort II will be posted in the coming weeks. Subscribe for email updates from the Converging Risks Lab to be notified. Also follow CRL on Linkedin and Bluesky for more. Mallory Stewart, Chief Executive Officer of CSR, expressed her excitement at the continuation of this Fellowship, noting a heightened sense of urgency to make progress in understanding the challenges to human control. "What we have seen in 2026 is myriad examples of this technology defying our expectations - not just in terms of its capabilities, but also our ability to keep it aligned to our goals and intent. This Fellowship comes at the perfect time to build the proficiency of national security leaders to understand the contours of human control and play a vital role in shaping AI's development and use." Caroline Baxter, Director of CSR's Converging Risks Lab, and CSR's lead for the Fellowship, noted: "The Hugging Face attack was a turning point for AI safety and alignment, and while the substance of the debate it sparked - are AI safety and AI development incompatible - wasn't new, the moment was. A critical mass of developers, policymakers, and the general public joined in and elevated these long-discussed issues to the foreground. Now is the time to separate signal from noise as Council on Strategic Risks collectively figure out how to move forward with this technology, and I am extremely excited to work with a new cohort of fellows to position them to lead this dialogue. Hamza Chaudhry, AI and National Security Lead at FLI, said: "When we launched this fellowship, keeping AI under meaningful human control was the preoccupation of a small circle of specialists. A year later, it increasingly runs through the center of national security planning as AI challenges traditional debates across nonproliferation, arms control, strategic stability, counter-terrorism, and more. The development and deployment of advanced AI will continue to be increasingly relevant to the mission of the national security community, and this fellowship was built to prepare them for it. The Converging Risks Lab at the Council on Strategic Risks has already prepared a fantastic class of inaugural national security fellows for an AI world, and I am proud to support the next chapter of this fellowship." CSR representatives are available for comment upon request: [email protected] for more information.

An artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer who has been vocal about the risks of AI has launched a nonprofit focused on developing safe AI systems. Yoshua Bengio — who won the Turing award along with Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun — on Tuesday (June 3) unveiled LawZero, which is an AI [] The post AI Pioneer Yoshua Bengio Launches Nonprofit to Develop Safe AI appeared first on PYMNTS.com.