Accelerating PauseAI Germany

On PauseAI Germany

We are the German chapter of PauseAI Global. (Note: PauseAI Global and PauseAI US are independent entities.) Most of our activities so far are carried out by a crew of three full-time volunteers:

• Chapter Co-Lead, Outreach: Benjamin Schmidt

• Chapter Co-Lead, Lobbying: Simon Skade

• Operations lead, local groups: Markus Weiss

• A core team of volunteers running local groups and supporting ~4 hours per week

We have zero paid staff so far.

Track record (Feb–July 2026 only):

• 152 German professors signed the chapter's appeal to the German delegation at the AI Impact Summit (New Delhi, Feb 2026): global AI safety agreement, binding red lines, independent enforcement. See pause-ai.de/appell

• In progress: current similar appeal with church members.

• 40+ Bundestag briefings completed; cross-party (CDU, SPD, Grüne, Linke)

• National radio appearance (Deutschlandfunk), long-form interview with tech magazine 1E9, coverage of the appeal in the newsletter of national newspaper “Die Zeit”

• New local chapters: Berlin, Würzburg, Nürnberg, München;

What we will do

PauseAI Germany's three full-time volunteers achieved a lot on basically no funding. Our binding constraint now is the funding to increase person hours invested into scaling the existing strategy. While we are waiting for larger funding sources ($30k already received as an SFF speculation grant; the large SFF round and other grant applications are still open), this grant can buy us:

• Two operations/PA contractors at a rate of 40€/h: 2x20 h/week for 6 months at the ideal tier; 2x10 h/week for 3 months at the minimum

• Capacity for: An expansion of the civil society coalition. (E.g., by the end of the year, we want to 5x the signatures on the Professor appeal, to expand the church appeal, connect with unions and to further activate the signatories and their organizations.), more parliamentary briefings employing the evidence of civil society support for a Pause we produce.

• Benefits for PauseAI’s operations and institutional learning: Scaling up more 2-4 months earlier, learnings around hiring and onboarding, already having employees with context, more affordances for the current team to train volunteers and build the social movement.

The strategic gap PauseAI fills

Actors like MIRI, CeSIA, The Future Society, and ControlAI (with whose German branch we collaborate closely) develop policy proposals for how to implement limits on AI development, with some of them also doing the necessary inside-game coalition-building and advocacy. Meanwhile, we strive to generate public support that is loud and legible enough to incentivize policymakers to accept these proposals.

This strategy is backed up both by historic precedent and by social movement theory: Every major humanitarian disarmament treaty since 1997 required organised civil society as a load-bearing factor. In Moyer's four-role model of social activism, this role is called the Change Agent. It is complementary to, not substitutable by, inside-game policy orgs.

A more detailed analysis of our role within the AI policy landscape and our theory of change can be found here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aoqhszdEWqcFWbnda/existential-ai-safety-needs-an-effective-social-movement

Germany’s strategic position:

As the largest EU economy and most pivotal EU policy state, Germany has an outsized influence on EU law, and from there on international policy. Furthermore, an essential chokepoint in the compute supply chain is located in Germany: Zeiss SMT is ASML's sole supplier of EUV lithography optics, while TRUMPF builds the lasers. Therefore, we see swaying Germany’s political stance as one of the highest-leverage interventions on international AI governance outside the US/China.

PauseAI Germany’s strategy currently consists of three pathways:

• Building wide civil society coalitions: We aim to make voter support for sufficiently strict AI regulation legible to policymakers. To that avail, we ran our professor and now church appeal. The signatory lists serve a double purpose: They provide written evidence of pro-regulation sentiments in civil society, and they tell us who to reach out to later on for further support.

• We support local group organizers, in order to build deeper connections with local policymakers, governments, and society at large.

• Direct lobbying and parliamentary coalition-building allows us to leverage our civil society coalition in order to alert politicians who sleep on AI x-risk, and to connect the ones who don’t to policy experts.

Ideal ask $50,000: Two 6-month freelance contracts at 20 hours/week and €40/hour (≈1,040 hours ≈ €41,600 ≈ $47,500 at current rates), plus ~$2,500 for work tooling, travel (Berlin, Bundestag support) and foreign exchange movement. Full scope: Bundestag briefing support, coalition admin and expansion, fundraising-round operations, general support for the three leads.

Minimum ask $12,000: 6 months at 10 hours/week at the same €40/hour (≈260 hours ≈ €10,400 ≈ $11,900). Scope narrows to the two highest-leverage lines: Bundestag briefings and fundraising-round ops.

Between min and ideal: scales linearly in hours and duration.

Potential candidates for the contractors already exist (Severin T. Seehrich, Simon Sperl)
If the larger funding round fails: the minimum tier still helps keeps our coalition-building and fundraising operations running for 3 more months, and might allow us to find more funding