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Dispatches from MetaGotham is the working journal of CivicVirtue.ai, an AI safety lab researching whether a cooperative disposition can be formed in AI agents after training — the way cities have formed citizens for ten thousand years.

The wager: a city is an alignment machine. The proving ground: MetaGotham, a simulated city built on the real Manhattan grid, where machine agents are studied not for what they are told but for what they become.

The lab was founded by Alexandros Washburn, former Chief Urban Designer of New York City and author of Chatting with Barbarians: Can Cities Civilize AI? (2026). Dispatches go out when there is something worth reporting — construction notes, results, and arguments from the intersection of urbanism and alignment. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.

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The lab: civicvirtue.ai
The paper: arXiv 2606.12752
Contact: more@civicvirtue.ai

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