Lucie Philippon

Thanks to Linda Linsefors for encouraging me to write my story. Although it might not generalize to anyone else, I hope it will help some AI safety newcomers get a clearer picture of how to get into the field. In Summer 2023, I thought that all jobs in AI safety were super competitive and needed qualifications I didn’t have. I was expecting to need a few years to build skills and connections before getting any significantly impactful position. Surprisingly to me, it only took me 3 months after leaving my software engineering job before I landed a job in AI policy. I now think that it’s actually somewhat easy to get into AI policy without any prior experience if you’re agentic and accept some tradeoffs. The job: International AI policy event organizer From January 2024 to February 2025, I worked on organizing high level international AI policy events: * Responsible Adoption of General Purpose AI, a2-day seminar for the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council run by Nicolas Miailhe, which got policymakers in the Pacific informed about AI risk and produced recommendations for the AI Action Summit and for APEC * AI Safety Connect, a side event of the AI Action Summit run by Cyrus Hodes. As the summit organizers basically removed safety from the agenda, our event was the main place where the experts and policymakers gathered in Paris for the summit could go to hear about and discuss AI Safety concerns. For both of those jobs, an AI policy expert was delegating to me the task of achieving their vision for the event. Basically, my role was to do all the event production so they could focus on getting the right people to come and the right conversations to happen. The day-to-day job was mainly split into: 1. Writing emails: sending invitations; managing attendees, speakers and stakeholders; managing vendors 2. Writing Google Docs: 1. Research-like documents (e.g. who to invite, which venue to use, which theory of change to follow, what to schedule and when)