Sentinel is a foresight and emergency response team seeking to react fast to calamities. After some initial success, we are looking for funding to expand.

We have an excellent foresight team, with members from Samotsvety. It has been producing a steady weekly cadence minutes looking at possible precursors for calamities at blog.sentinel-team.org. Some readers report that these minutes completely substitute all other news consumption. As an example of our current foresight capabilities, we correctly anticipated the WHO's decision to rate monkeypox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), and gave thorough details on monkeypox early on. Other specific threats we are currently keeping track of are: H5N1, solar flares; rising militant terrorism in the Middle East, India and Pakistan; AI incidents and governance developments, Putin’s nuclear bluffing, and indications of Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

We think that AI will be “a big deal”, but we are particularly worried about risks and interactions that are hard to conceptualize long beforehand ("black swans", "unknown unknowns"). This is the biggest philosophical difference with projects in the EA cluster, which generally tend to have more top-down, hedgehog-style threat models in mind. We instead deploy forecasting where it works best: on shorter time horizons.

And we are pairing our foresight team with an emergency response team, with the intention of being able to react fast, much faster than governments or sclerotic institutions. We’ve recruited competent operators for the team and plan to flesh this out further with more diverse skill sets. The attached emergency response team isn’t set in stone, but we think there’s a lot of value in a closer relationship between foresight and action. Some inspirations of individuals competently reacting to—admittedly smaller-scale catastrophes—are VaccinateCA, the Lübeck vaccine, or the World Central Kitchen.

If you've been following this project since the original Manifund proposal, one important development has been getting a cofounder, Rai Sur, to complement my (Nuño's) skills; he's been working out great.

We will use the funding we raise to go full time, incorporate Sentinel as a US nonprofit, increase the size and scope of the foresight and reserve teams, buy more ops capacity, and have an emergency fund to deploy in case of an emergency.

Per our own BOTEC, we compare favorably against various impact benchmarks for existential risk. We also compare favorably against the benchmark of (total funding / total risk)—if every project beat that benchmark and all existential risk funding is spent, existential risk would reach zero. However, note that estimates about one’s own projects tend to be too optimistic.

You can read our much longer & detailed funding memo here.