Asa Cooper Stickland

Asa Cooper Stickland

I'm a research scientist at the UK AI Security Institute, working on AI control and model organisms of misalignment. I was previously a postdoc with Sam Bowman at NYU, did MATS with Owain Evans, and mentored for the MATS, SPAR and Pivotal fellowships. I got my PhD at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Iain Murray.

Publications

Highlighted Research

RepliBench: Evaluating the Autonomous Replication Capabilities of Language Model Agents
Sid Black*, Asa Cooper Stickland*, Jake Pencharz, Oliver Sourbut, Michael Schmatz, Jay Bailey, Ollie Matthews, Ben Millwood, Alex Remedios, Alan Cooney (2025)
Benchmark for evaluating AI systems' ability to autonomously replicate themselves.
Future events as backdoor triggers: Investigating temporal vulnerabilities in LLMs
Sara Price, Arjun Panickssery, Sam Bowman, Asa Cooper Stickland (2024)
Language models can trigger backdoors only on future events (allowing them to only trigger during deployment).
Taken out of context: On measuring situational awareness in LLMs
Lukas Berglund*, Asa Cooper Stickland*, Mikita Balesni*, Max Kaufmann*, Meg Tong*, Tomasz Korbak, Daniel Kokotajlo, Owain Evans (2023)
Introduces the concept of "out of context learning", and methods for measuring situational awareness in large language models.
See all my publications on Google Scholar →

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