Last year Gavin, I and several others published Shallow review of technical AI safety, 2025 on LessWrong. We gathered hundreds of Arxiv papers, Alignment Forum posts and other AI safety materials, and created a taxonomy and editorial explaining some of the key changes in the field of AI safety in 2026.
Since then, the field has moved on and we would like to publish and updated 2026 version of the blog post on LessWrong.
Two deliverables:
Produce and publish the LessWrong post "Shallow review of technical AI safety, 2026" based on 2026 AI safety papers and a new updated taxonomy.
Update the website https://shallowreview.ai to include the 2026 shallow review.
Funding goals:
$3K: Minimum needed to successfully complete the project.
$10K: Extra effort into creating the taxonomy, finding and curating novel sources, and seeking feedback on drafts.
Mostly wages for participants.
Also API credits for AI analysis, classification.
Stephen, Jord, Lenz and Gavin worked on the 2025 version of the shallow review of technical AI safety. We also have two new participants this year: Boden and Rian.
Failure would be not publishing a 2026 version of the LessWrong blog post.
Not raising enough funding increases the risk of failure.
$0 so far.
The Shallow Review series is a widely used, well-regarded map of technical AI safety, and this team (including Gavin Leech) has delivered previous editions, so execution risk is low and the $3K minimum is cheap for a public good many researchers and funders rely on. The write-up is sparse, with no detailed budget, timeline or explanation of the new contributors' roles, and the marginal value of a yearly update is somewhat lower than the original. Still, the track record and low cost make this a sound bet that past funders are likely to support again.
Written by Claude Opus 5.5 on Oct 14, 2026 as part of our experimental AI rating system.