Johns Hopkins hires director for new AGI governance initiative

Johns Hopkins is hiring a director to run Governing the AI Transition, a new initiative inside its School of Government and Policy that aims, in the posting's words, to make the university "the world leader for cross-disciplinary research, training, and practice on the challenges of governing the societal-scale transition that powerful AI will precipitate."

GAIT is explicit about the frontier. Its focus, the listing says, is "on the frontier of AI research, and transformative capabilities that are on the horizon, including the prospect of AI systems that meet or exceed median human performance across a broad set of cognitive functions, often described as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)."

The director will "oversee multi-year, multi-million-dollar initiatives," working across three tracks: research (alignment and governance scholarship, fellowships, conferences and journals); training (AI governance coursework, a planned Master's degree, and executive education); and outreach.

The school itself is newly stood up. William G. Howell was named its inaugural dean, and its AGI Governance Fellowship, launched under Professors Gillian Hadfield, Seth Lazar, and Nicholas Caputo, is already running. Two AI-policy researchers we follow had shared the listing.