AI Safety Australia and New Zealand

AI Safety Australia and New Zealand, operating as AI Safety ANZ, is a community-building organization founded in 2022 by Yanni Kyriacos and Chris Leong. Its mission is to grow a large, ambitious, and influential local community dedicated to preventing the most harmful impacts of artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on existential and catastrophic risks from advanced AI systems.

The organization operates community groups in major Australian cities — Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, and Perth — as well as in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch in New Zealand. It hosts regular in-person monthly meetups, online discussion events such as the Cozy Conversations series, and an annual AI Safety Careers Conference that sold out in 2024 with over 55 attendees and an 89% recommendation rate.

AI Safety ANZ's flagship technical program is TARA (Technical Alignment Research Accelerator), a free 14-week in-person part-time program for professionals and students across APAC. The first TARA cohort (March–June 2025) achieved a 90% completion rate, with 29% of participants securing fellowships like SPAR and LASR, and another 29% transitioning into AI safety roles. The program covers transformer architectures, mechanistic interpretability, reinforcement learning, and model evaluations via the ARENA curriculum. It also runs the Sydney AI Safety Fellowship, a structured program for early-career AI safety researchers in Australia.

In May 2024, Yanni Kyriacos transitioned to full-time leadership with funding from the Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF), enabling significant expansion of programs and community reach. The organization has also raised project-specific funding through Manifund for TARA and the Sydney AI Safety Hub. The website is managed in partnership with Good Ancestors, an Australian charity supporting long-term future work. The organization aligns closely with the effective altruism and rationalist communities and is listed as an EA regional group.