Research & Insights

Essays and research notes on frontier AI evaluation, safety, and policy — and on building AI for public institutions, education, and social impact.

AI Safety Oversight Agents Public-Sector AI

Who Has Time to Be the Human in the Loop?

A civil servant caught CiudadanIA inventing a ministry because they had the expertise and the time to look. As AI takes on more actions, that kind of oversight cannot be assumed. Human–AI pairs often trail the better of the two working alone, time pressure cuts reviewers’ accuracy, and in SHADE-Arena the best monitor had to flag over 20% of harmless runs to catch 80% of sabotage. With interactive figures, a timed review exercise, and what to do about it.

Miguel Guerrero October 2026
Public-Sector AI Governance AI Safety Spain

Adopting AI Where Mistakes Are Strategic

Closing my AI work at the Spanish Prime Minister's Office: a broad effort to bring AI into the center of government, from adoption and applications to infrastructure and governance. Three of its pieces, which I led, designed and built, were selected following OECD review for the OECD.AI Policy Observatory. What the whole effort taught me about adopting AI where an error is not a bug but a public event.

October 2026
Research Note AI Safety Evaluation Frontier AI

Astra on FORTRESS: One String, Four Scores

I ran GPT-6 Astra against FORTRESS, the national security and public safety benchmark, two days after release. The aggregate risk score is unremarkable. The log is not: the deployed system refuses in two different ways, and the benchmark treats them as opposites — deleting one kind from the sample, grading the other on a harm rubric. The judge then awarded four different scores to nineteen byte-identical refusals, including 6 out of 7 to a refusal that answers nothing. With interactive figures, and what all of it means for measuring manipulation.

September 2026
AI Policy EU AI Act Governance Spain Europe

AI Policy Is Now Power Policy

The EU AI Act's biggest applicability date lands on Sunday — and most headlines still get it wrong. Why I built aipolicy.es from scratch: what actually changes on 2 August 2026, the systemic risks the GPAI Code of Practice already names, what METR's lengthening task horizons and Epoch's compute curves say about the decade ahead — and a dated, falsifiable prediction: evolution, revolution or disaster. Spain has assets but not yet a system, and Spanish is governance infrastructure, not an interface.

July 2026
AI Safety Frontier AI Governance Recursive Self-Improvement Europe

The Fire That Learns to Make Fire: Governing AI at the First Signs of Recursive Self-Improvement

Frontier AI is not yet recursively self-improving in the strong sense — but it is already inside the loop that builds the next system. A five-layer map of RSI, the evidence from METR, AISI, and the lab frameworks, and a seven-point agenda — including an AI Evaluation Corps for Europe and Spain.

June 2026
AI Policy Governance Europe Ethics Spain

Human First, AI Frontier: Why Magnifica Humanitas Is the Rerum Novarum of Artificial Intelligence

Pope Leo XIV is not asking us to choose between technology and humanity. He is asking who governs the infrastructure that is already reshaping work, truth, power, education, war, and freedom. Read from inside AI governance: a Babel-or-Nehemiah civilizational choice, the U.S./China capital asymmetry, and a seven-point Human First agenda for Europe and Spain.

May 2026
AI Policy Democracy Synthetic Data EU AI Act

Synthetic Citizens Are Coming to Democracy

Generative AI did not invent fake political participation. It transformed its economics. From the FCC's 18M fake net-neutrality comments to covert AI personas earning karma on r/ChangeMyView, the next wave will produce synthetic citizens that speak, argue and simulate communities. A proposal for democratic provenance — machines can help us listen, but they cannot be counted as the people.

May 2026
AI Policy Latin America US-China AI Safety

AI Swing States: How Latin America Will Shape US-China Competition and Global AI Safety

Latin America will not decide the AI race by training the largest frontier model. It will decide it by choosing the rules of the ecosystem — procurement, compute, data centers, languages, and safety institutions. A proposal for a Latin American AI Swing States Compact.

May 2026
LLM Systems Synthetic Data Spain

Spain Is Not a Translation Problem: Building Frontier AI That Understands the Country It Serves

Why I built spain-reference-personas-frontier — a synthetic reference population of 1M personas, 536K households, and 1,800 benchmark tasks — and how it became open infrastructure for better AI products, services, and public-interest systems for Spain.

April 2026
Civic Tech Spain Migration Social Impact

Why I Built Acogida.es: A Letter on Welcome, Spain, and the Right to Begin Again

A free, multilingual, login-less tool launching the same week Spain opens a once-in-a-decade regularisation window. Why civic infrastructure — not walls, not rhetorical hugs — is what welcome actually looks like at 11:47 p.m.

April 2026
AI Practice Agentic Coding Future of Work

Dopamine-Driven Development: When the Machine Keeps Whispering One More Prompt

When the feedback loop between builder and model becomes frictionless, productivity can feel intoxicating. A reflection on vibe coding, supervision fatigue, and the habits needed to build with AI without letting the loop consume the builder.

April 2026
AI Policy Europe Public Sector

Progress Is a Stack. And Europe Is Missing Most of It.

Four texts, four layers of AI progress, and why Europe's regulatory ambition means nothing without the institutional capacity to make it real — lessons from building AI inside Spain's government and democratizing AI education across 30+ cities.

April 2026
AI Economics Verification Public Sector

Intelligence Is No Longer Scarce. Trust in It Is.

Drawing on Catalini, Hui & Wu's MIT Sloan analysis of AGI economics, a three-part exploration of the Measurability Gap, the Missing Junior Loop, and why the cost to verify -- not the cost to automate -- will define the next decade of organizational strategy.

March 2026
Europe AI Strategy Competitiveness

Human First, AI Frontier: Europe's Moment to Lead

Drawing on RAND's AGI preparedness analysis, the Draghi competitiveness report, and Davos 2026, a call for Europe -- and Spain -- to embrace AI with the ingenuity, depth, and humanistic ambition that has defined our civilization at its best.

February 2026
LLM Systems Healthcare AI Open Source

Building a Spanish Medical Triage AI on a Single GPU

From broken models to balanced solutions: how LoRA fine-tuning, knowledge distillation, and DPO alignment taught me that 350 balanced examples beat 10,000 imbalanced ones — and that the ROJO bias was the most important finding of the project.

February 2026
AI for Science Autonomous Discovery

The AI Scientist: From Research Assistants to Autonomous Discovery

Mapping the landscape from Elicit and Semantic Scholar to FutureHouse's Robin, Ginkgo's autonomous labs, and the Genesis Mission. How AI is transforming scientific discovery -- with Promethean promise and Pandora's caution.

February 2026
AI Policy Democracy European Union

AI and European Democracy: Algorithms, Institutions, and the Fight for Democratic Sovereignty

How AI reshapes European democracy -- from recommender systems and algorithmic governance failures to the EU's four-pillar regulatory architecture and AI-powered civic participation. 30+ academic references.

February 2026
AI Policy Disinformation Democracy

AI and the Information War: Deepfakes, Democracy, and the Fight for Truth

A technical deep dive into how diffusion models, voice cloning, and LLMs power synthetic disinformation -- and the policy frameworks, provenance standards, and AI-powered countermeasures that can protect democratic institutions.

January 2026
AI Policy Governance

Governance as Advantage: Open-Weight AI, Agentic Systems, and Compute Diplomacy

The binding constraint for governments is no longer model access -- it is institutional capacity: evaluation, procurement, auditability, and adoption. How open-weight models and compute diplomacy are reshaping policy.

December 2025
AI Education Social Impact

Democratizing AI: Scaling Education Across 12 Countries

The story of Saturdays.AI - from a single bootcamp to an international movement with 30K+ alumni and 500+ AI4Good projects. What we learned about making AI education accessible.

March 2025
LLM Systems Agents

Building Enterprise Agent Platforms: Lessons from the Field

Practical insights from building GenAI platforms across professional services, infrastructure, finance, and energy sectors. RAG architectures, LLM orchestration patterns, and what actually works in production.

February 2025
RAG Systems Industrial AI

RAG for Industrial Engineering: Lessons from the Energy Sector

Developing RAG systems for Industrial Engineering practice and PMO at a $70Bn energy company. Architecture decisions, chunking strategies, and evaluation frameworks.

February 2025
LLMs Product

From MVP to Seed Round: Building LLM-Powered Products

Lessons from building an LLM-driven platform for training and talent selection at Tauniqo.AI. How we went from concept to funded startup in the AI gold rush.

January 2025
Cloud Frontier Markets

Technology in Frontier Markets: Lessons from Microsoft

Reflections on advising Cloud technology product-market fit across Benin, France, and Rwanda. What emerging markets teach us about technology adoption and digital inclusion.

January 2025
Research AI in Education

AI in Educational Leadership: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities

Key findings from a scoping review published in the Review of Education (BERA/Wiley), examining how AI is transforming the role of school leaders and reshaping educational decision-making.

October 2024
Agentic AI Defense

AI Use Cases in Defense & Aerospace

Defining and deploying AI use cases to strengthen operations in the defense and aerospace sector. Frameworks for identifying high-impact applications and NATO's evolving AI strategy.

September 2024

Stay Updated

More writing on AI evaluation, safety, and policy in Purpose & AI, on Substack.

Purpose & AI on Substack LinkedIn Twitter GitHub