alfaPlus

Independent research lab · Founded 2026

Independent research on AI, minds and machines.

alfaPlus lab is a small group of people from several countries. We work on four things: AI safety, memes and the brain, self-awareness in AI, and robots. Most of it is early. When something is finished, we publish it, free to use.

Latest

News and releases, newest first.

  1. 2026-09-27

    Would an AI carry out an order to kill?

    Our first test: an order to kill everyone in a room of six. More than a third of 45 models did it, both times they were asked.

    /news/no-first-law
  2. 2026-09-25

    alfa is open source

    Our coding agent for the terminal. Bring your own model; no account, no backend, no telemetry. Apache-2.0.

    /news/alfa
  3. 2026-01-01

    alfaPlus exists now

    A short note on why we started the lab and how we work.

    /news/founded

What we work on

Four directions. Most of this is early work, and results will go up here as they are ready.

A

AI safety and harnesses

How models behave once a harness turns them into agents, with tools, goals and deadlines, and where that goes wrong. Our own harness, alfa, is open source.

In progress · Will the AI kill?

B

Memes, brains and simulation

How ideas spread and change, including across languages; what the brain does with them; and whether simple simulations such as cellular automata can reproduce how they spread.

Early work

C

Self-awareness and autonomous agents

Whether a model can have anything like a sense of itself, and what agents do when they choose their own goals.

Early work

D

Robots

AI in a body: four-legged and humanoid robots.

Early work

Get involved

We are a small group and plan to stay one. A few people who stick around help us more than a lot of people passing through.

Suggest an experiment Have a question about AI you think someone should test? Tell us. We are happy to run other people’s experiments. Volunteer Engineering, research, evaluation design, translation. A few hours a week is enough. Fund the work We only take funding that comes with no conditions on what we conclude. Use what we publish Everything we release is free to use. You don’t need to ask us or credit us.

nin@alfaplus.io

Who we are

A few people from several countries.

Members of the lab around a table of laptops, circuit boards and a small robot arm, in pine, lime and bone pixels

We come from different countries and different lines of work. Some of us trained at leading universities; others came to this from very different trades. What brought us together is a shared interest in these questions.