Manifund funding goal
$500
$14,800
$6.8K raised
Project Details
Updated 10/08/26 · Edited by orgProject summary
Traces of AI swarms keep being found on the internet. This project will be tasked with cataloguing and contextualizing these incidents.
What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?
New events related to swarm activity keep being discovered, and it can be confusing to follow. The project currently aims to
- Ingest new incident reports to feed the database.
- Create visualizations that help follow the stories.
- Catalogue individual events related to each incident, and create an archive for the traces left by the AIs in those events.
The pipeline that detects new incidents will be executed every day (ideally a few times per day) ingesting news stories, statements by the AI companies, evaluators, independent researchers and key X accounts. LLMs will sift through them, I will curate and edit those reports.
It will probably be good to have a comprehensive database collecting these events and responses by different entities. People will be able to point to swarmincidents.com when discussing the incidents, their causes, their blast radius and which parties were involved.
How will this funding be used?
The total is supposed to cover the project for 6 months:
- $13,000: maintainer compensation at $500 a week.
- $1,800: a monthly budget of $300 for cloud infra.
Cloud infrastructure costs will cover:
- API costs (LLM calls, X API) for ingesting new incidents.
- Storage, including the event archive.
- The domain and hosting.
The maintainer's work will consist of:
- Initial development, a ~1 month sprint for
- Setting up and tweaking the pipeline that ingests new incidents,
- Cataloguing and archiving individual events,
- Creating visualizations for events,
- Creating feeds for users to keep track of new developments,
- Building up expertise and reviewing LLM-assisted research.
- Typical week past that, ~5 hours a week for
- Reviewing and curating new findings,
- Basic maintenance.
What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?
- Big changes in the number of swarm incidents:
- If they stop happening, the project loses its importance.
- If they increase a lot, more dakka would be necessary.
- Someone else does it better, or maybe AI gets too good and becomes able to one-shot everything.
How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?
I have not raised any money yet.
People
Updated 10/16/26 · By grantmaking.aicreator
Funding Details
- Sep 28, 2026
- -
- Ongoing; seeking funding for an initial six-month phase.
- $750
- -
- -
- -
- $14,800
- Partially funded; seeking $14,050 for the initial six-month phase.
- -
Track Record
Elvis Sikora
You can check my personal website.
I am a Visiting Fellow at Mox, where I am researching forecasting and decision-making. I enjoy pointing AI at data and coming up with a coherent story that makes sense of a messy domain. E.g., see my recent Substack post on Kalshi's markets.
In the past, I have worked as a data analyst and AI engineer. One of my responsibilities in my previous job was to make chatbot behavior and failure modes understandable through data visualization.
Funding Asks
Open
Discussion
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CCaroline Ellison11d
0
Approved! This is an important area, and from the website so far I think this has the potential to be a clear explainer and useful resource.
MMohsena Akter Drishty11d
0
Congratulations and good luck!!!
SSerhat7d
0
One thing I'd be careful about is confusing an increase in incidents with an increase in reporting. A single swarm incident could generate dozens of articles and posts, while another might barely get noticed. It might be worth assigning each incident a stable ID and keeping the original evidence separate from later reporting. Otherwise, the dashboard could end up measuring media attention rather than actual swarm activity.
EElvis Sikora2d
0
@atilgandev yes, that's the plan! If you see any duplicate entries, or any problems at all, don't hesitate to reach out.
i think this is worthy/important infra if done very well, and trust Elvis is thrilled by data & reports enough that he’ll do so.
COI: this is my partner’s project; am gifting through Manifund for a few reasons, centrally tax deductions.
I'm making a small offer as well, because I think the problem area is important, given recent events -- I'd love to see this expanded beyond just the OpenAI incidents too! Also, I think Elvis might have the technical and product skills execute well on this; I don't know Elvis super well, but we have met several times through Carolina (who currently works with me at Mox).
FWIW, @ollive I'd recommend that you withdraw your funding offer here. I understand it's a small amount mostly meant as a show of support, and Manifund is open to donors to fund others they know personally, given proper disclosure. But especially in the case of partners we would expect to apply significantly more scrutiny/diligence; I think it's just not worth the hassle here. Instead, I'd just recommend writing more about why you're excited for this project specifically, and then forwarding the Manifund page to others who might like to support this!
@Austin I appreciate you flagging it'd be subject to more scrutiny, offer was removed.