Managing AI X-Risk

I run Techplomacy Magazine, part of the Techplomacy Foundation, founded by former UN officials with a focus on bridging the gap betweenfast evoling tech industry and slow-moving government regulation. Most writing on AI existential risk is made for people already inside the AI safety world. It almost never reaches the people who will actually be dealing with this on the ground: foreign ministries, UN missions, national tech ministries. Most of them have no real source explaining what x-risk means for them or what they can actually do about it.

Managing AI X-Risk is a new quarterly track inside Techplomacy Magazine's flagship Techplomacy Conversations series. Over one year (August 2026 to July 2027) I will commission, edit, and publish 15 interviews and essays pairing Global South and North voices that includes officials, researchers, and people working where AI risk meets governance. Each piece will cover something specific, not just a broad overview or analysis, but will close with concrete recommendations for policymakers and AI companies. Topics will include who should hold authority over emergency shutdown decisions, what a real AI incident notification protocol would need, and what smaller states should actually be asking for as AI capability keeps concentrating in a handful of companies and countries.

At the end, i will also publish a short synthesis memo pulling together what came up across the year, aimed directly at funders deciding where to put their next dollar.

Every piece and the closing memo will get distributed to UN Resident Coordinators across 129+ countries, plus UN missions and embassies in Geneva, New York, and Paris. This will run through existing relationships and email lists from my and my co-founder's backgrounds working inside the multilateral and bilateral organizations.

People can not make good decisions about something they don't understand. Right now, almost nobody is explaining AI x-risk to the officials who would actually be involved if something went wrong, not researchers, not people writing policy papers, actual diplomats and ministry staff who would be the first ones fielding a crisis. That gap isn't really a research gap and the analysis already exists. It's a translation and distribution gap, and it's underfunded because it sits between categories: too applied to be "research," too international to be "US policy," too specific to be general AI safety awareness.

Closing that gap, even partially, means more of the people who'd actually be in the room during an AI crisis or negotiation go in already understanding what's at stake, instead of learning it under pressure for the first time. It also means funders get a clearer, ground level picture of where the real governance gaps are, since almost nobody is producing that kind of mapping right now. I am not claiming this single-handedly will prevent a bad outcome. I am claiming it's genuine and currently unclaimed piece of work, and one I'm positioned to actually do well given the network and platform I already run.

At $45,000: $15,000 goes to contributor honoraria across the 15 pieces (roughly $1,000 each), $24,000 covers my editorial and production time, and $6,000 covers publication and distribution costs.At the $30,000 minimum, this becomes a reduced version: around 8 to 9 pieces instead of 15, with a narrower distribution push. Contributor pay and my time scale down proportionally, and less goes into building out distribution beyond our current network.