NYU Alignment Research Group Joins Microsoft’s External Red Team Alliance (EXTRA)

July 30, 2026

Microsoft announced this week that the NYU Alignment Research Group has been selected as a member of its new External Red Team Alliance (EXTRA), a global initiative led by the Microsoft AI Red Team to strengthen AI safety and security research through collaboration with universities and technical experts around the world. As part of the initiative, the group has received an unrestricted $25,000 gift to support their ongoing research on language models that aims to address longer-term concerns about the impacts of deploying highly-capable AI systems.

The Alignment Research Group is led by Sam Bowman, Associate Professor of Linguistics and Data Science, He He, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science, and Mengye Ren, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science. 

EXTRA includes universities across six continents and is designed to help expand independent AI safety research globally while fostering stronger collaboration between academia and industry practitioners. “AI safety research is now more important than ever, and universities continue to play a critical role in advancing the field,” said Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, lead of the Microsoft AI Red Team. “Through EXTRA, we want to support researchers who are helping improve understanding of how increasingly capable AI systems can be evaluated, secured, and governed responsibly.”