In July, Jacob Tsimerman, a professor at the University of Toronto, received the Fields Medal, math's highest honor. Upon receiving the prize, Dr. Tsimerman announced a professional pivot, taking a leave from academia and redirecting research toward A. I. safety.

He will start a job in the safety department at Open AI later this month. On Tuesday, Dr. Tsimerman announced the formation of the Mathematical A. I.

Safety Institute (MAISI), an independent research institution unaffiliated with Open AI. Located in the Bay Area, MAISI will begin its first full semester of research in January 2027, aiming to hire 10 to 30 mathematicians, and significantly more the following academic year. With MAISI, Dr. Tsimerman, who will serve as scientific director, brings a message to the academic community: "A.

I. safety is a meaningful area of research," he said in an interview from Toronto. "It is a legitimate intellectual pursuit that is interesting, useful, and there is real progress to be made."Over the years, despite advancements in artificial intelligence, many mathematicians did not take the technology seriously, considering it instead to be the purview of software engineers. But, as Dr. Tsimerman noted, "Engineers can only implement ideas that have been developed, and we need new ideas." Since A. I. systems are fundamentally made from math — linear algebra, calculus, probability, statistics — he and like-minded mathematicians view some problems in A.

I. safety as fundamentally math problems. "We need more of that sort of mathematical clarity and carefulness in the A. I. industry," said Andrew Critch, MAISI's executive director, an A. I. researcher and mathematician.

Mathematically trained researchers see an opportunity for higher math to address concerns such as how A. I. systems interact and cooperate with one another; how agents verify that they are behaving responsibly and that outputs are accurate; and how A. I. systems can be designed from the bottom up to be resilient against even currently unidentified vulnerabilities and risks. Dr. Tsimerman pointed to a cryptography tool called zero-knowledge proofs — a mathematical way of providing verification about a system without revealing more than necessary. Dr. Goldwasser is a co-founder of a similar math-oriented A.

I. safety institute — the Institute for Responsible Superintelligence (RESI) — which launched in August in Cambridge, Mass. RESI's founding scientific team includes Vinod Vaikuntanathan, an M. I.

T. cryptographer, and Adam Tauman Kalai, an A. I. safety and ethics researcher who recently left Open AI.