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This is the Responsible Research Policy referred to in the SPAR Mentor Agreement and SPAR Mentee Agreement. Last updated September 9, 2026. Changes apply going forward.

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Responsibility for a project's research, its ethics, the legality of its methods, compliance with the terms of the services it uses, and judgment about dual-use risk, sits with its mentors. Kairos screens participants but doesn't supervise the research. This policy says what we ask of every project and everyone on it, and how to reach us when a call is hard.

Work that needs Kairos's written approval before it starts

Whatever your project's status, the team doesn't begin work in these categories without approval from [email protected]:

• work with hazardous biological agents, or the computational design of dangerous biological or chemical agents (for example using protein, genomic, or molecular-design models to build toward harmful capability);
• work whose output would give a bad actor material uplift toward serious chemical, biological, or cyber harm they couldn't easily obtain already, such as a transferable jailbreak or detection-evasion technique, a demonstrated real-world capability uplift, an operational attack toolchain, or a benchmark or dataset that surfaces novel operational hazard detail;
• research on human participants of the kind that ordinarily requires ethics review (experiments on people, deception studies, sensitive interviews);
• letting AI agents act autonomously on the outside world in ways that affect third parties who haven't agreed to take part, beyond ordinary browsing and retrieval;
• offensive security testing against systems the team doesn't control;
• large-scale collection of sensitive personal data.

Measuring or red-teaming model capabilities using already-public information, and building safeguards, evaluations, or refusal benchmarks, don't need approval. Routine data labelling, annotation, user surveys, and feedback collection don't either.

To ask for approval:

Mentors must email [email protected] with the project, what you want to do, why it matters, and the safeguards you'll use (access controls, what won't be published, review by whom). We aim to answer within 5 business days and may consult outside advisors in confidence. Approval is an email from us saying so.

Sensitive Projects

A few projects work on findings that could cause harm if released carelessly, such as certain biosecurity-relevant results. Kairos may designate a project a Sensitive Project at acceptance or later, stating its reasons in writing, and a mentor may ask for the designation. Until a mentor or Kairos releases the designated findings in writing, or the team publishes them after giving notice:

• the findings stay within the project team, and this binds every mentor and mentee;
• the team keeps them in private repositories and drives, doesn't post drafts or partial results publicly, and doesn't share them with people outside the team (including colleagues at an employer) without a mentor's okay;
• a mentee's request to publish is at the mentor's sole discretion;
• the team gives Kairos at least 7 days' notice before any public release;
• Kairos won't publish them itself, and won't use its program license to do so.