AI Risk: Why Care?

AI Risk: Why Care? is an interactive public education tool available at whycare.aisgf.us. It is a preview version of a chatbot built on an AI safety knowledge database, designed to make the case for why advanced AI poses a catastrophic and potentially extinction-level threat to humanity. Users enter their age and professional background and receive personalized explanations of AI risk concepts, including machine learning interpretability challenges, misalignment, convergent instrumental subgoals, and the difficulty of steering advanced AI systems. Each query costs approximately $0.20 to run via LLM inference.

The project is operated by two nonprofits founded and led by Mikhail Samin (also known as Misha), a London-based technology entrepreneur who previously founded AudD, a music recognition API company with clients including Warner Music Group and Sony. Samin is a Giving What We Can pledge signatory who has donated over $100,000 of his personal income to AI safety causes. He estimates a 70–85% probability that advanced AI will cause human extinction if development continues without adequate safety measures.

The AI Governance and Safety Institute (AIGSI) is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on research, outreach, and education to ensure AI is developed safely and in alignment with human values. The AI Safety and Governance Fund (AISGF) is a paired 501(c)(4) organization that can engage in lobbying and legislative advocacy. Together, the two entities aim to explain the AI extinction risk to policymakers, think tanks, and the general public, and to support allied organizations such as CAIS and MIRI.

As of their public disclosures, no staff receive salaries — including those working full-time. All funding goes toward communications: online ads, LLM inference costs, and distributing copies of the book 'If Anyone Builds It' to influential people. The organizations plan to hire professional designers and communicators and scale up ad campaigns as more funding is secured.