Stanislav Fort and Aisle: Prague AI startup takes on Anthropic

Stanislav Fort, a young Czech scientist and co-founder of the cybersecurity startup Aisle, gave up astrophysics for artificial intelligence — and is now challenging the world’s giants from Prague. Where the large models from Anthropic and OpenAI find no errors in code, Aisle uncovers critical vulnerabilities.

Fort studied at the prestigious universities of Cambridge and Stanford, worked at Google DeepMind and was one of the first employees at Anthropic. He could once have studied the Universe in the research group of Stephen Hawking himself, but he chose AI. After eight years in the world’s technology hubs, he returned to Prague: Fort is convinced that a global company can be built from the Czech capital too.

He founded Aisle together with the Czech billionaire Ondřej Vlček and Jaya Baloo, an internationally recognised cybersecurity expert. It all began with a simple message: Vlček wrote to Fort on LinkedIn and suggested having a coffee to discuss his research. That is how the company was born.

After a year of work, Aisle can boast an impressive list of angel investors. The first of them was Jeff Dean, former chief scientist at Google. The investors also include senior executives from Microsoft and Hugging Face.

According to Fort, Aisle’s system finds serious security holes even in the most heavily protected systems in the world — including where other models proved powerless. The company also does a significant part of its work free of charge.

In a video podcast on The Forbes Show, Fort explains how a small Czech firm, as the biblical David, can beat global Goliaths, how he assesses Europe’s competitiveness in the AI race, whether he regrets turning down work with Hawking, what mark he left at Anthropic, and why he believes artificial intelligence can save humanity.