Conjecture is an AI alignment research startup co-founded by Connor Leahy, Sid Black, and Gabriel Alfour that developed Cognitive Emulation, a safety-focused AI paradigm aimed at producing controllable and transparent systems. On March 26, 2026, Connor Leahy announced that Conjecture's chapter was closing, characterizing the effort as having ultimately failed. Conjecture's Twitter Score is 8.9 out of 1000 as of October 2026, ranking #103,901 among 493,668 tracked accounts.
Conjecture began operating in March 2022 and built its early identity around Cognitive Emulation, a proposal designed to yield predictably bounded AI systems as an alternative to mainstream large-language-model approaches. The startup was affiliated with EleutherAI, the open-source AI research collective from which several of its founders emerged. In 2025, Conjecture pivoted away from research toward pure-play product development, but that effort subsequently failed to meet the company's own internal benchmark, contributing to the decision to wind down.
Conjecture previously received backing from Arthur Breitman and Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried was convicted on seven counts spanning fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Conjecture has published 152 posts on the platform and has been mentioned by 3 accounts a total of 3 times.
Who follows Conjecture on X?
The accounts that follow Conjecture include 31 founders, 6 angel investors, 12 influencers and 1 VCs. Among them are Ameen Soleimani, Dave White, Dystopiabreaker, tropoFarmer, Nat Friedman and Siqi Chen.