Horizon Research is an independent AI safety lab focused on temporal cognition: how AI systems represent time, form preferences across it, and behave over long horizons.

About

Our work spans mechanistic interpretability, activation steering, and evaluations of AI systems in high-stakes environments such as legal reasoning, live production software, and civic institutions.

We publish openly and build evaluations and tools the broader research community can use.

Focus

The behaviors that matter most for safety, like planning, patience, and strategic waiting, only show up over a horizon. Reading and steering them in current models is an open problem, one that sits underneath deception, reward hacking, and agent control.

We study how models encode time and intertemporal preference, how those representations can be steered, and how AI systems behave in high-stakes environments.

Projects
Papers
Intertemporal Preference Steering in Qwen3 via Contrastive Activation Addition
ICML 2026 Workshop on Mechanistic Interpretability
LinuxArena: A Control Setting for AI Agents in Live Production Software Environments
ICML 2026 Workshop on AI in the Wild (AIWILD)
Better Call Reward: Reward Hacking as Strategic Abstention in Legal Reasoning Models
ICML 2026 Workshop on AI for Law (AI4Law)
Creative Collision: Directorial Persona Steering and Competition in Large Language Models
ICML 2026 Workshop on Generative AI & Creativity

Accepted at ICML 2026 workshops.

Team
Contact

Or write directly to shenk.justin@gmail.com