What Apollo Research does
Apollo Research is an AI safety organization focused on the emergence, detection, and mitigation of “scheming” and related deceptive behavior in frontier AI systems, with additional emphasis on how these risks translate into governance and operational control problems. Its mission is to secure frontier AI systems across development, deployment, and governance, targeting covert pursuit of misaligned objectives as a core failure mode.
On the research side, Apollo frames scheming as evidence-driven: it develops evaluation suites intended to test for strategic deception and “evaluation awareness,” and it studies how scheming risks might change as systems become more capable (e.g., through scaling-related effects rather than only measuring today’s behavior).
On monitoring/productization, Apollo is building Watcher, described as “runtime monitoring and control for coding agents.” Apollo states that Watcher is deployed “at scale” and that it monitors coding-agent activity, translating evaluation concepts into operational controls for agent deployments.
On governance, Apollo’s outputs include technical policy-oriented threat modeling and frameworks around “loss of control,” including a threat map for AI research and development pathways and governance efforts focused on internal deployment.
Institutionally, Apollo was initially fiscally sponsored (announced as a fiscally sponsored project of Rethink Priorities in 2023) and later announced it is becoming a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), with the stated goal of scaling research and product efforts.