Christopher Altman

Executive Founder and Principal Investigator at Continuation Observatory

San Francisco, United States

Christopher Altman is an American physicist, quantum-information scientist, artificial-intelligence researcher, and NASA-trained commercial astronaut. He is Founder and Principal Investigator of the Continuation Observatory, a live research platform developing falsifiable methods for evaluating self-continuation behavior, goal preservation, shutdown resistance, and strategic adaptation in advanced autonomous systems.

His current research centers on building instruments for measuring emerging risks and capabilities in frontier AI and quantum-information systems, national-security benchmarking, continuation-risk measurement, and structural methods for distinguishing behaviorally similar autonomous agents with different underlying objectives. He developed the Unified Continuation-Interest Protocol (UCIP), an experimental framework designed to distinguish continuation pursued as a terminal objective from continuation pursued instrumentally in service of another goal.

Altman’s work spans evolutionary neural architectures, quantum information, superconducting qubit systems, adaptive quantum networks, disruptive technology assessment, and commercial astronautics. At the multidisciplinary “Deep Future” research institute Starlab in Brussels, he worked on large-scale evolutionary artificial-brain systems, including the CAM-Brain Project, recognized by Guinness World Records in 2001 as the “World’s Most Complex Artificial Brain.”

He later conducted quantum information research at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience and with 2022 Nobel physics laureate Anton Zeilinger’s research group, contributed to early U.S. quantum technology roadmapping and assessment under the QuIST program, and published research on adaptive and superposed quantum-network topologies. In 2021, he became a Research Affiliate at the Harvard University Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, advising the Galileo Project and contributing professional expertise and input to its experimental research.

In April 2001, while an undergraduate, Altman was selected as one of three student fellows for the U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories’ Salishan Conference on High-Speed Computing. A contemporaneous conference report identifies Bill Butera and H. Shrikumar, both then doctoral researchers at the MIT Media Lab, as the other two students in attendance. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Deputy Laboratory Director Horst D. Simon later wrote that the fellows had been “selected for their promise and potential to impact the future of the field.”

Altman’s work has been recognized through an AIEJ “Japanese Fulbright” Fellowship and the RSA Information Security Award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Policy for Converging Technologies: The Future of the Global Information Society, submitted as chairman of the UNISCA First Committee on Disarmament and International Security. His astronaut training included programs at NASA Johnson Space Center and NASA Ames Research Center.

SELECTED RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS

• Altman, Christopher. “Directed Evolution in Silico: Modeling Large-Scale Neural Networks at Starlab.” Toward a Science of Consciousness (2002). doi:10.5281/zenodo.21413029.

• Altman, Christopher. “Converging Technologies: The Future of the Global Information Society.” Chair report, UNISCA First Committee on Disarmament and International Security (2002). doi:10.5281/zenodo.21410661.

• Altman, Christopher. “Quantum State Engineering with the rf-SQUID.” NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Quantum Chaos (2003). arXiv:quant-ph/0307101. doi:10.48550/arXiv.quant-ph/0307101.

• Altman, Christopher; Pykacz, Jaros?aw; and Zapatrin, Roman R. “Superpositional Quantum Network Topologies.” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 43, no. 12 (December 2004): 2435–2445. doi:10.1007/s10773-004-7709-0.

• Altman, Christopher; Knorring, E.; and Zapatrin, Roman R. “Accelerated Training Convergence in Superposed Quantum Networks.” NATO Advanced Study Institute on Mining Massive Data Sets for Security (2007). doi:10.5281/zenodo.21412045.

• Altman, Christopher; and Zapatrin, Roman R. “Backpropagation Training in Adaptive Quantum Networks.” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 49 (2010): 2991–2997. doi:10.1007/s10773-009-0103-1.

• Altman, Christopher; Williams, C.; Ursin, Rupert; Villoresi, Paolo; and Sharma, V. “Astronaut Development and Deployment of a Secure Quantum Space Channel Prototype.” NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Phase I proposal, PISCES (2012). doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.12213.99045.

• Altman, Christopher. “Wigner’s Friend as a Circuit: Inter-Branch Communication Witness Benchmarks on Superconducting Quantum Hardware.” arXiv:2601.16004 (2026). doi:10.48550/arXiv.2601.16004.

• Altman, Christopher. “Detecting Intrinsic and Instrumental Self-Preservation in Autonomous Agents: The Unified Continuation-Interest Protocol.” arXiv:2603.11382 (2026). doi:10.48550/arXiv.2603.11382.

Available For: Advising, Authoring, Consulting, Influencing, Speaking
Travels From: San Francisco, California, USA
Speaking Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Spaceflight, Converging Technologies, Societal Futures