Exclusive: Former OpenAI policy chief creates nonprofit institute, calls for independent safety audits of frontier AI models
By Jeremy Kahn
Featured on FORTUNE.COM | January 15, 2026, 12:01 PM ET
Former OpenAI policy chief Miles Brundage, who has just founded a new nonprofit institute called AVERI that is advocating for independent AI safety auditing of the top AI labs.
Miles Brundage, a well-known former policy researcher at OpenAI, is launching an institute dedicated to a simple idea: AI companies shouldn’t be allowed to grade their own homework.
Today Brundage formally announced the AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute (AVERI), a new nonprofit aimed at pushing the idea that frontier AI models should be subject to external auditing. AVERI is also working to establish AI auditing standards.
The launch coincides with the publication of a research paper, coauthored by Brundage and more than 30 AI safety researchers and governance experts, that lays out a detailed framework for how independent audits of the companies building the world’s most powerful AI systems could work.
