Cosmos Institute granted Jake Birdwell on September 10, 2024 for an AI-driven digital wargaming platform, with funding in the $1K to $10K fast-grant range that Cosmos Ventures uses for 90-day prototype builds.
Birdwell is a Deployment Strategist at Palantir Technologies working with U.S. government customers, and holds a B.A. in History and Politics with First Class Distinction from Oxford and an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford, where he focused on the role of AI in national security. He previously worked at the Hoover Institution on economic statecraft research and is affiliated with Air University's Innovation Accelerator (AUiX). His wargaming work centers on infrastructure resilience during conflict scenarios.
The platform treats wargames as a deliberation tool for human decision-makers rather than a forecasting engine, giving policy and strategy teams a structured environment for stress-testing decisions involving advanced AI systems, including scenarios where AI agents are participants rather than just objects of policy. Adjacent work in the same space includes CSIS's case for democratizing wargaming with generative AI and RAND's papers on AI for wargaming and modeling, which place Birdwell's prototype in a small but rapidly populating corner of defense analytics.
Within the open AI stack the grant is an agents and governance bet: a thin civil-society alternative to wargaming products bundled inside defense primes, where the cohort framing prioritizes structured deliberation tools that policy staff can actually inspect.
Recipient
Jake Birdwell
Funder
Cosmos Institute · foundation · US
Backs philosopher-builders making prototypes, essays, and projects at the intersection of AI and human flourishing, with emphasis on reason, decentralization, and individual autonomy.
Primary source
https://blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/announcing-cosmos-ventures
Additional sources
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