Zero to One in AI Safety: Halcyon's Mike McCormick on Launching 30 New Orgs & the Founder Bottleneck

Nathan Labenz (0:00)

Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Mike McCormick, founder and CEO of Halcyon, a combination non-profit grant maker and for-profit venture fund, working toward a single mission of helping the world's most talented founders and leaders launch new AI safety, cybersecurity and biosecurity organizations.

Mike's core belief is that organizations solve problems for the world. And, of course, AI is creating a lot of problems that we need to solve in a remarkably short period of time. Which means that what we need most right now isn't more ideas, but founders who can build the organizations needed to implement whatever turn out to be the most viable solutions at scale.

In three years, Halcyon has helped launch roughly 30 such organizations, which have collectively raised roughly half a billion dollars. Goodfire, who's been featured on the show multiple times, is the best illustration of how Mike works, with a special focus on the six months before and six months after an organization is started. The first career transition grants Mike ever made were to eventual co-founders Eric Ho and Dan Balsam, while they were still running their previous company but starting to think about changing focus to work on AI directly. The financial boost, the vote of confidence, and the network building support he provided helped them found a company which has since achieved unicorn status and become one of the best places in the world to do interpretability research. Other orgs that Mike has supported include PassGuest's AIUC, which does agent standards and audits for insurance purposes, Fathom, which has advanced policy discussions with credible early proposals for independent regulatory schemes, and Asymmetric Security, which is building cybersecurity forensics agents meant to defend companies from employee account compromise incidents. Beyond that, Mike also introduces Transluce, which is working on scalable oversight, and Hadrian, which is stockpiling PPE. It is admittedly a very broad portfolio, but as Mike puts it, we are speed running six or seven industries worth of AI revolution all at once.

In a 2026 that remains plausibly on the AI 2027 timeline, rapid competent execution is obviously critical and clearly will require heroic efforts. To take just one personal example, for nearly a month now, I've been trying to donate AeroLamp lights to my son's classrooms. And while my son's teacher said that she loves the idea, it's a new thing and nobody at the school has been able or willing to sign off on it. This too, it turns out, Mike is involved in starting an organization to address. Naturally, we talk about how seemingly short timelines affect his strategy, what he looks for in people to back, and how he thinks about both for-profit and non-profit governance. And we also discuss the verification technologies we'll need to sustain pacing agreements, as well as the challenge of getting everything from cryptography to hardware manufacturing to diplomacy all working together as one. The main headline of today's episode, though, is that there is still time for ambitious leaders to start new AI safety organizations, which could prove incredibly important. And more broadly, that there's never been more support to scale these organizations with first-class talent, which means that all sorts of accomplished professionals, including many who do not have technical ML backgrounds, should be actively thinking about pivoting their careers into AI safety. If you are feeling the pull, Mike offers his contact info later in the episode, noting that a warm introduction is welcome but not required.

With that, I hope you're inspired to see yourself as a potential difference-maker by this conversation about building the institutions that we will need to sustain AI safety, with Mike McCormick, Founder and CEO of Halcyon. Mike McCormick, Founder and CEO of Halcyon. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

Mike McCormick (3:59)

Yeah, so good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Nathan Labenz (4:02)

Thank you. This has been a long time coming. I think we met a couple of years ago now, and you have been one of the behind the scenes movers and shakers that have been pretty instrumental in creating and getting off the ground a bunch of different organizations that are now active across the AI safety space. I think I can speak for everyone when I say thanks to you and to others who've done similar work because this is all coming at us pretty fast. Lord knows we need all the different organizations and specialists that we can possibly have to navigate this critical time that we find ourselves in.

Let's start maybe by just kind of introducing like what is Halcyon? There's a couple of parts to it and then we can of course move into talking about some of the organizations that you've helped to stand up.