Hello, I’m Jan Wehner. I’m a researcher on the Frontier Security Team at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS), where I work on technical AI governance to reduce catastrophic risk from AI, spanning agent safeguards, AI×Cyber, government use of AI and AI strategy. At the moment I’m threat modelling how malicious AI agents deployed in national security agencies could cause large-scale harm and how AI control could prevent that. I’m also working on designing honeypots to detect, incriminate and deter malicious agents deployed internally.

Previously, I was a Winter Fellow at GovAI under Alan Chan, and I researched AI Safety and Interpretability at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, supervised by Prof. Mario Fritz and Prof. David Krueger. My past work spans Representation Engineering, harmful fine-tuning attacks and Inverse Reinforcement Learning. During my MSc I also founded two student groups, Delft AI Safety Initiative and Effective Altruism Delft.

I love mentoring research projects — see my mentoring page for past projects and current opportunities to work with me, including MATS Winter 2027 (applications open).

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at jan(at)iaps.ai!