Nico Almgren

Research

Nico is a co-author of the mechanistic-circuits-at-frontier-scale result and one of the principal contributors to the ab-circuits library's pairing-protocol integration — the tooling that lets a paired interpretability cell pull circuit-level activations from a producing cell's checkpoints under the artefact-subscription pipeline.

He has been with alphabell since 2020 and is one of the contributors most often paired with RSI-axis runs. He has called one halt and confirmed two; the experience has produced what he calls 'extreme conservatism about what a pairing record actually says we can do.'

Nico is based in Stockholm. He is one of the contributors who works most closely with the European Union's AI Office advisory pool, on a personal basis.

Background

Ph.D. computer science, KTH Stockholm, 2014.

Prior to alphabell: KTH; Cantor Initiative; Wayfarer Institute.

Selected publications

• May 2025 · ab-mechanistic-ci
  Mechanistic Circuit Analysis at Frontier Scale: cells as a unit of interpretability
  Jiang Yifei, Nico Almgren, Karima Belkadi, Hester Vandekerckhove
• Sep 2024 · ab-interpretabili
  Interpretability Cell Pairing: how every dual-use capability run gets a watchful sibling
  Karima Belkadi, Hester Vandekerckhove, Yuki Cho
• Sep 2025 · ab-scalable-overs
  Scalable Oversight for Multi-Step Agent Systems: a Debate-Plus-Trace Approach
  Ifeoma Nwosu-Howard, Hiroshi Tanigawa, Maral Lotfi, Ruth Wernicke
• Mar 2025 · ab-verifiable-pol
  Toward Formal Verification of Learned Policies in Bounded Environments
  Aviva Stern, Sun Kyung-min, Felipe Avelar
• Aug 2025 · ab-compositional-
  Compositional Latent Dynamics for Long-Horizon World Modelling
  Jonas Bremer, Sasha Petrov, Felicity Anjali Sandirasegaram, Tomoko Niwa

Full publications index →

Recent talks

• 700 circuits, give or take, ICLR 2025
• What pairing reveals about circuits, NeurIPS workshop 2024