It's more important than ever that PauseAI is funded. Pretty much the only way we're going to survive the next 5-10 years is by such efforts being successful to the point of getting a global moratorium on further AGI/ASI development. There's no point being rich when the world ends. I encourage others with 7 figures or more of net worth to donate similar amounts. And I'm disappointed that all the big funders in the AI Safety space are still overwhelmingly focused on Alignment/Safety/Control when it seems pretty clear that those aren't going to save us in time (if ever), given the lack of even theoretical progress, let alone practical implementation.
11
PauseAI US 2025 through Q2
Project summary
PauseAI US's funding fell short of expected, and now we are only funded until the end of 2024! Money donated to this project will go to fund the operations of PauseAI US until midyear 2025.
What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?
PauseAI US advocates for an international treaty to pause frontier AI development. But we don't need to achieve that treaty to have positive impact-- most of our positive impact will likely come from moving the Overton window and making more moderate AI Safety measures more possible. Advocating straightforwardly for what we consider the best solution is an excellent frame for educating the general public and elected officials on AI danger-- we don't know what we're doing building powerful AI, so we should wait until we do to proceed-- compared to tortured and confusing discussions of other solutions like alignment that have no clear associated actions for those outside the technical field.
To fulfill our goal of moving the Overton window in the direction of simply not building AGI while it is dangerous to do so, PauseAI US has two major areas of programming: protesting and lobbying.
Protests (like this upcoming one) are the core of our irl volunteer organizing, local social community, and social media presence. Protests send the general overarching message to Pause frontier AI training, in line with the PauseAI proposal. Sometimes protests take issue with the AI industry and take place at AGI company offices like Meta, OpenAI, or Anthropic (RSVP for 11/22!). Sometimes protests are in support of international cooperative efforts. Protests get media attention which communicates not only that the protestors want to Pause AI, but shows in a visceral and easily understood way the stakes of this problem, filling the bizarre missing mood surrounding AI danger ("If AI companies are doing something so dangerous, how come there aren't people in the streets?"). Protests are a highly neglected angle in the AI Safety fight. Ultimately, the impact of protests is in moving the Overton window for the public, which in turn affects what elected officials think and do.
Organizing Director Felix De Simone is based in DC and does direct lobbying on the Hill as well as connecting constituents to their representatives for grassroots lobbying. Felix holds regular email- and letter-writing workshops for the general public on the PauseAI US Discord (please join!) aimed at specific events, such as emailing and calling the California Assembly and Senate during the SB-1047 hearings and, more recently, workshops coordinating supportive emails expressing hope about the possibility of a global treaty to pause frontier AI development to attendees of the US AI Safety Conference. We work with SAG-AFTRA representatives to coordinate with their initiatives and add an x-risk dimension to their primarily digital identity and provenance-related concerns. PauseAI US is part of a number of other more speculative legal interventions to Pause AI, such as working with Gabriel Weil to develop a strict liability ballot initiative version of SB-1047 and locate funders to get it on the 2026 ballot. We are members of Coalition for a Baruch Plan for AI and Felix attended the UN Summit for the Future Activist Days. We hope to be able to serve as a plaintiff in lawsuits against AI companies that our attorney allies are developing, a role which very few others would be willing or able to fill. Lobbying is more of a nitty gritty approach, but the goal of our lobbying is the same as our protesting: to show our elected officials that cooperation to simply not build AGI is possible, because the will and the ways are there.
How will this funding be used?
Salaries - $260k/year
Specific Events - ~$7.5-15k/year
Operating costs - ~$24k/year (this includes bookkeeping, software, insurance, payroll tax, etc. and may be an overestimate for next year because there were so many startup costs this year-- if it is, consider it slack)
Through 2025 Q2 -- $150k.
Our programming mainly draws on our labor and the labor of our volunteers, so salaries are our overwhelmingly largest cost.
Q1&Q2 programming:
- quarterly protest
- monthly flyering
- monthly local community social event
- 2+ lobbying events for public education
- PauseAI US Discord (please join!) for social times, AI Safety conversation, and help with running your own local PauseAI US community
- PauseAI US newsletter
- expansion of Felix's lobbying plan, improving his relationships with key offices
Org infrastructure work by Q2:
(This one is massive. We just hired Lee Green to run ops.)
- massively improved ops and legal compliance leading us to be able to scale up much more readily
- website with integrated event platform streamlining our volunteer discovery and training processes and allowing us to hold more frequent and larger protests
- Executive Director able to focus on strategy and fundraising and not admin
- improved options for donating and continuous fundraising
Incidental work likely to happen by Q2:
- strict liability ballot initiative will have progressed as far as it can
- We respond to media requests for comment on major news events, may muster small demonstrations and/or orchestrate calls into key offices
- supporting other AI Safety organizations with our knowledge and connections
- lots of behind the scenes things I unfortunately can't discuss but which are a valuable part of what our org does
Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?
Executive Director - Holly Elmore
Founded this org, long history of EA organizing (2014-2020 at Harvard) and doing scientific research as an evolutionary biologist and then as a wild animal welfare researcher at Rethink Priorities.
Director of Operations - Lee Green
+20 years experience in Strategy Consulting, Process Engineering, and Efficiency across many industries, specifically supporting +40 Nonprofit and Impact-Driven Organizations
Organizing Director - Felix De Simone
Organized U Chicago EA and climate canvassing campaigns.
donated $90,000
donated $90,000
Greg Colbourn
3 days ago
I've been impressed with both Holly and Pause AI US, and Joep and Pause AI Global, and intend to donate a similar amount to Pause AI Global.
donated $90,000
Greg Colbourn
3 days ago
(This was 1 Bitcoin btw. Austin helped me with the process of routing it to Manifund, allowing me to donate ~32% more, factoring in avoiding capital gains tax in the UK).
Austin Chen
7 days ago
Approving this grant! As a note, Manifund is currently fiscally sponsoring PauseAI US, helping them receive tax-deductible donations while they are still applying for their own 501c3 status. In exchange, we ask for a 5% fiscal sponsorship fee, which also applies to donations made through this page.
Neel Nanda
about 15 hours ago
@Austin To clarify, do all Manifund grantees pay a 5% fee on donations via Manifund? Or just the grantees who are also fiscally sponsored by Manifund, and they pay it regardless of whether donations come via Manifund or elsewhere?
Austin Chen
about 14 hours ago
@NeelNanda The latter - PauseAI US has signed a specific fiscal sponsorship agreement where all donations made to them are structured as donations to our 501c3, and they pay the fiscal sponsorship fee on that.
Other grantees on Manifund do not pay any fee to our platform, as of today. Instead, we often ask large donors we work with (including the one funding your regranting budget) to pay an extra 5% to help cover Manifund operational costs; smaller donors (generally <50k in total, paying with credit card) we serve at no fee.
(I've been considering changing our structure so that all donations made through Manifund include the 5% fee, to simplify our offering/align incentives/make our costs clear; if we do this we'd announce it and make it very clear in our UI)
Neel Nanda
about 6 hours ago
@Austin Thanks for clarifying!
Fwiw, without much context on the finances here, I'd be pro not having a 5% fee on smaller donors - my intuition is that it won't raise much money, and the discouragement of a fee would have an outsized effect on reducing donations. While larger donors are more likely to be rational about this kind of thing, and also to be able to judge how much value Manifund is actually adding to the ecosystem.
donated $500
Jason
9 days ago
My sense is that broad-based public advocacy as well as pause/slow-down advocacy is relatively underfunded, and that this may be in part because of among potential funder ideology.
PauseAI has shown a willingness to talk about stuff (like AI causing mass loss of jobs) that is more legible and politically salient to the public than AI x-risk, even if less desirable to some funders. I think that's ultimately going to be a critical piece of moving the needle on public sentiment and thus public policy in ways that mitigate a broad range of AI-related risks.
donated $1,000
Michael Dickens
12 days ago
As a donor, how should I think about whether to donate to PauseAI Global vs. PauseAI US? I would like both to have more money but I only have limited budget. Ideally I would donate to a unified org and you can then spend the money where it's most needed, but I assume you can't do that because PauseAI Global and PauseAI US are legally separate entities.
Right now I'm thinking PauseAI US has the advantage that most big AI companies are headquartered in the US, so protests and lobbying here should be more impactful.
PauseAI US
12 days ago
@mdickens Yes, particularly because PauseAI US does lobbying and needs to closely adhere to US laws around that, we are separate legal entities. The orgs do different things-- Global is ideally an incubator for national orgs, which will handle more of the specific programming, and PauseAI US is a national org. On balance, I think you should you should give to PauseAI US. I (Holly Elmore, ED of PauseAI US) am of course biased in favor of PauseAI US's strategy, which I set, in addition to the fact that AGI companies and development are primarily here and the AI Policy of Earth is largely in the hands of the US government. I also think PauseAI US is run better and will scale in a way PauseAI Global will not be able to handle.
For one thing, PauseAI Global has no full-time employees, with Joep running most things while also running a for-profit company, and has volunteers in positions of leadership, which imo is poor planning. PauseAI US has three full-time employees working only on developing PauseAI US. He wants to pay volunteers stipends (a thing that is easy in the Netherlands); I want to use money to hire employees and have them coordinate volunteers for set programming: protesting and grassroots lobbying. PauseAI US has a dedicated lobbyist (Felix de Simone) and PauseAI Global does not, doing only sporadic one-off lobbying projects. (Again, a major difficulty here is that lobbying mostly takes place within national borders.)
PauseAI Global is currently better for digital community, you don't need to worry about nationality to join, and they maintain a larger Discord and have a stronger social media presence. Their website is very good, whereas ours is still under development. It is easier to go the PauseAI Global Discord and get involved in remote volunteering right away. However, both Global and US agree that our primary goal is to have local, in-person communities, which I believe the digital focus is selecting against. The PauseAI US Discord (new) is focused more on the org's programming, protesting and lobbying, with odd remote volunteering jobs (like graphic design) supporting those projects instead of standing on their own. Our irl local group model and focus on protests as grassroots lobbying as the primary form of volunteering makes our growth much more concentrated and scalable than a patchwork of decentralized volunteer-led projects. Plus, I anticipate that our digital presence, especially investing in an integrated events platform as part of our website and our streamlining of protest events, will scale better than Global's is currently set to as well.
PauseAI Global and PauseAI US have complementary roles to play, and I want us both to be fully funded. But on the margin, unless you specifically want global digital community stuff, PauseAI US is 1) where the action is, 2) better run, 3) more focused on higher value programming, 4) will scale better.
Michael Dickens
12 days ago
Actually the link worked fine when I pasted it into Discord, it just didn't work in my browser
Holly Elmore
13 days ago
Sorry, this is a little confusing-- I was answering the question "why did you upvote this project?"
This project I did as an individual evolved into the org and project above :)