The Institute for Progress is a non-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C., launched in January 2022 by co-founders and co-CEOs Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney. Its stated mission is "accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress." It is associated with the progress-studies and abundance policy current, focused on why US scientific and industrial output has slowed and which policy levers — funding mechanisms, immigration, permitting, procurement — would speed it up. (Source: ifp.org)
Focus areas
IFP organizes its work around several areas. In metascience, it studies how federal science funding through NIH and NSF allocates money and experiments with faster, more risk-tolerant funding mechanisms. On high-skilled immigration, it treats visa and green-card reform as a technology-competition instrument and contributes to the US-China talent-flow debate (US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics). Its biosecurity work covers pandemic preparedness and, increasingly, the AI-biology intersection. In emerging technology and industrial policy, it treats compute, energy, and manufacturing capacity as foundations of US technological leadership.
IFP's approach is operational rather than ideological: it places fellows and ideas directly into the policy process and has had visible influence on both parties' science-and-technology staffs. (Source: mckinsey.com)
AI-policy relevance
In its AI-related work, IFP treats frontier-AI capability gains as a reason to harden the physical chokepoints of biology rather than (primarily) to regulate models, placing it at the intersection of biosecurity and AI policy.
This position is reflected in the ScreenDNA Open Letter of June 3, 2026, which IFP co-organized with the Foundation for American Innovation, with Stapp named as IFP's organizing principal. The letter calls on Congress to make screening of synthetic DNA/RNA orders, and of synthesis equipment, mandatory, with recordkeeping for traceability. Its signatories include all four frontier-lab CEOs (Hassabis, Altman, Amodei, Suleyman), gene-synthesis industry leaders, Nobel laureates, and national-security figures. See AI Biosecurity. The coalition was assembled so that the screening mandate was framed in a way whose support "does not depend on any particular view of AI," bridging existential-risk and normal-technology camps.
IFP has separately taken a position on frontier-development pacing, set out in a report published August 6, 2026 and restated in a Noahpinion guest post three days later. "How Should the US Prepare for Increasingly Automated AI R&D? 23 low-regret policy recommendations" was written by Tim Fist, its director of emerging technology policy, Saif M. Khan, a distinguished technology fellow, and colleagues Tao Burga, Arthur Tellis, Ben Schifman, Jonah Weinbaum and Olivia Scharfman (How Should the US Prepare for Increasingly Automated AI R&D? (IFP, August 2026)); Fist and Khan restated its first half on August 9, 2026 (Should we \"pace\" AI self-improvement? (Fist and Khan, August 2026)). Both respond to the July 2026 "Pacing the Frontier" statement.
The authors name three risks that pacing capacity would address — offence-dominant capability uplift, loss of control, and power concentration — propose that pacing specify which automated R&D activities pose severe risks and that resources be reallocated toward diffusion and safety research if a threshold is exceeded, and cite the AI Data Center Moratorium Act proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the counterproductive default they expect otherwise. The 23 recommendations are grouped under seven areas: transparency into automated AI R&D, state capacity, a risk-management strategy, AI verification technology, AI resilience, extending the US AI lead, and option value for international cooperation. Several name CAISI as the implementing body, including a recommendation that Congress resource it at a minimum of $84 million per year and 184 personnel — a figure IFP had recommended previously — and that it be given a direct line to a senior White House or cabinet-level official and the ability to forward-deploy staff into frontier AI companies. The stance sits alongside the biosecurity work rather than replacing it: in both cases IFP argues for building a specific state capacity ahead of the capability that would require it, without asking for model-level regulation. See Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI).
Relationships
- supports: An Open Letter in Support of Mandatory Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening and Recordkeeping (June 2026) (co-organizer), AI Biosecurity (mandatory-screening policy lane)
- supports: Pacing the Frontier (statement from employees of frontier AI companies, July 2026) (Fist and Khan response proposing operational content), Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) (pacing of automated AI R&D)
- related: Foundation for American Innovation (FAI) (ScreenDNA co-organizer; the right-of-center counterpart in the coalition), US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics, Compute Governance
- related: CBRN Uplift (the capability concern motivating the screening mandate)
Sources
Two supporting sources: the IFP launch post and a McKinsey Global Institute interview with Stapp, alongside the ScreenDNA letter. The page was created by the 2026-06-05 gap scan, having been flagged in the 2026-06-04 lint report as a missing entity (a ScreenDNA co-organizer with no page) and carried on the 2026-06-04 gap-scan deferred backlog.