As AI becomes more capable, it's crucial that governments have the capabilities to empirically understand and respond to risks. We've been building a research startup within the government to achieve that. Initially, our team of ML researchers focused on building LLM evaluations for societal impacts, dangerous capabilities, the effectiveness of safeguards, and agentic capabilities. We're now broadening our work, e.g. to study how we could predict specific capabilities and by launching a systemic safety grants program. In this talk, we'll provide an update on our technical and governance work.