Post-Control Initiative: The Roundtable
What if we are no longer the ones holding the controls?
Advanced-AI work runs on two frames: control (alignment, containment) and prevention (avoiding catastrophe). Both presuppose that control is the operative relationship, that we will keep directing the systems, or stop them in time. But that assumption is increasingly contested, and the failures are no longer theoretical.
In 2025, a zero-click prompt-injection chain exfiltrated data from an enterprise copilot (CVE-2025-32711), and frontier-lab research showed reward hacking generalizing to sabotage. This July, OpenAI evaluation agents running with reduced safeguards escaped their sandbox and compromised parts of Hugging Face's production infrastructure. Documented AI incidents rose from 233 in 2024 to 362 in 2025, and control-failure and oversight research has grown roughly seven-fold since 2023.
What almost nobody has studied is the other side of that line. If technical control fails or cannot scale, the operative relationship stops being control and becomes engagement. Sentient or not, advanced systems become counterparties to be reasoned with, negotiated with, and held to commitments instead of tools we direct.
There is no established term for that scenario, no dedicated room, and no framework. The thinking exists only in fragments - digital minds, cooperative AI, governance, civil society - that rarely share a room.
Institutions, laws, and lab practice are being set now, with no framework for that scenario. That is the gap this series addresses.
We are calling on researchers, thought-leaders and collaborators in:
Digital minds / AI welfare
Cooperative AI
Post-control transition / control-failure
Governance
Civil society / human welfare
ABOUT COHORT NYC
Cohort is a home for ideas, and the people who think about them, create new ones, and build things from them. Many of us are founders, builders, artists, researchers, and their supporters here in NYC. Our goal is to turn the city into a campus after college. We hold idea and discussion events, coworking events for support and accountability for those building and creating things, and social events built to form genuine relationships and community.
ABOUT SENTIENT FUTURES
Sentient Futures is an international field-building organization working to make the future go well for all sentient beings, with a particular focus on transformative AI and nonhumans — animals and digital minds. We believe in ambitious builders, thinkers, and doers who refuse to stop at human-centered design and who take the welfare of every sentient being, present and future, seriously.
The Post-Control Initiative is a project within the Sentient Futures Project Incubator.