We are announcing a multi-year research partnership with Constellation, focused on interpretability tooling for substrate-hosted agents. The partnership is the first formal cross-lab partnership alphabell has entered into outside the External Evaluation Cooperative; it has been approved through the standard signed-proposal process with a 67%-threshold partnership-class vote.
The scope of the partnership is narrow and deliberate. Constellation and alphabell will jointly develop tooling for interpretability-cell pairing in the agentic-engineering setting, with particular focus on the operational machinery — artefact pipelines, disagreement protocols, escalation channels — that has been the load-bearing piece of alphabell's pairing protocol. The partnership funds approximately three full-time researcher-years on each side over an 18-month period.
What the partnership is not: it is not a strategic alliance, a co-marketing arrangement, or a commercial relationship in any usual sense. Neither party will represent the other in external contexts. Neither party will co-author publications in a way that obscures contributor identity. Neither party will give the other influence over its research direction beyond the specific work covered by the partnership.
Why Constellation. We have known the Constellation interpretability team for years. They have done some of the cleanest work in the field on debate-based oversight, and their methodological discipline matches ours in ways that are surprisingly hard to find. The proposal text — which will be published in the public news index as part of the standard governance trail — articulates the specific shared commitments at length.
What we expect to produce. By the end of the partnership: an open-source extension to ab-pairs that supports cross-organisational pairing (paired cells where the two cells live in different organisations); a joint methodology paper on disagreement handling under organisational boundaries; and a set of in-the-field case studies drawn from real pairings the partnership has run.
What we will be careful about. Two things. First: the partnership covers tooling, not capability research. Neither party will share unreleased capability work as part of the partnership, and the pairing protocol we develop together must work across organisational boundaries — that is, it must function under the assumption that the paired cells do not share full access to each other's checkpoints.
Neither party will give the other influence over its research direction beyond the specific work covered by the partnership.
Second: the partnership is structured to be cancellable by either party at any time, with the cancellation clause not requiring cause. We have negotiated similar terms with funders in the past and we treat them as load-bearing. If, six months in, the partnership is not producing what we hoped, either party can wind it down.
A note on terminology. We use "partnership" sparingly. The External Evaluation Cooperative is not a partnership in this sense; it is a cooperative with multiple members. Most of our funding relationships are not partnerships either; they are funders who have approved the lab and whose terms are documented in the funding governance trail. The partnership with Constellation is the first arrangement we have entered into that crosses that line.
A note on artefacts. The joint methodology paper, when it ships, will carry both organisations in the affiliation list, with a per-contributor breakdown of which sections each contributor took primary authorship of. We treat per-contributor attribution as load-bearing — joint papers that obscure who did what are a small but corrosive practice — and we expect the paper to be longer than it otherwise would because of this. The cross-organisational pairing extension to ab-pairs, when it ships, will be MIT-licensed and will live in the standard alphabell-labs GitHub organisation, with co-maintainership granted to Constellation contributors for the lifetime of the partnership.
Signed: Karima Belkadi, interpretability axis steward, on behalf of the long-tenured contributor pool that approved the proposal. Specific questions to axis-interp@alphabell.com.
For the protocol details behind anything mentioned above, see /governance and /charter. For the structural commitments, /about.