Open-weight model safety
What actually survives fine-tuning, quantization, and open release, once the deployment-time guardrails are gone.
AI Safety Researcher · ML Engineer
Andreas Hermann
I'm an ML engineer and researcher moving into AI safety full-time. I did a PhD, then spent three years taking machine-learning systems into production. Now I work on two things: keeping open-weight models safe after they're released, and the misalignment that shows up when you wire models together into agents.
Now
I'm doing independent AI safety research, funded by a transition grant that runs through April 2027. Right now that means an inoculation project with Safe AI Germany: can a data-level "antidote" stop one narrow bad behavior from spreading into broad misalignment? I'm also running my own experiments on why more reasoning sometimes makes a model worse.
I'm open to research collaborations and fellowships, especially where the question is whether safety holds up in deployment.
as of August 2026
The bet
I spent years keeping machine-learning systems running in production. That's what shaped how I think about safety. I've watched which safety properties hold up once a model leaves the lab, and which ones quietly fall apart, and that gap is the thing I want to work on.
There's real research behind it too. I did a PhD, published 17 peer-reviewed papers (450+ citations), and spent the last year properly upskilling through ARENA, the AI Alignment Research Fellowship, and BlueDot. Read the longer version →
Career
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2026 – present
Independent AI Safety Researcher
Full-time research on open-weight model safety, compositional misalignment, and interpretability, backed by a BlueDot Impact transition grant.
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2026
AI Safety Research Fellow · Safe AI Germany (SAIGE)
Inoculation against model poisoning: training a model so its safety properties can't just be fine-tuned away later.
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2026
Facilitator · BlueDot Impact
Teaching technical AI safety cohorts and contributing to the alignment curriculum.
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2023 – 2026
ML / AI Engineering Lead
Three years taking machine-learning systems into production at scale, across classification, data extraction, and data-quality models.
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PhD
Doctorate · University of Münster
Information systems. REACH Award for the dissertation.
Research focus
Compositional misalignment
Why alignment tested on single models fails to compose once you chain them into multi-agent orchestrations, tool chains, and memory-augmented agents.
Interpretability & evaluation
The measurement tooling for safety: probes, evals, and mechanistic analysis that hold up in a real deployment.
Selected publications
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2026
Differences in Alignment Behavior between Single-Agent and Multi-Agent LLM Systems
Recent writing
- 2026-08
- 2026-06
- 2026-05
Reading list
Curated papers, courses, and tools annotated for AI safety researchers and engineers crossing over from adjacent fields.