Two contractors (10–20 h/week) to accelerate PauseAI Germany’s parliamentary and civil society coalition-building, and to accelerate the hiring and onboarding timeline while our first large funding round resolves.
Two contractors (10–20 h/week) to accelerate PauseAI Germany’s parliamentary and civil society coalition-building, and to accelerate the hiring and onboarding timeline while our first large funding round resolves.
Project Details
Updated 07/13/26 · Edited by orgOn 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:
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Chapter Co-Lead, Outreach: Benjamin Schmidt
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Chapter Co-Lead, Lobbying: Simon Skade
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Operations lead, local groups: Markus Weiss
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A core team of volunteers running local groups and supporting ~4 hours per week
We have zero paid staff so far.
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:
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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
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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.
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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.
Theory of Impact
Updated 07/13/26 · By grantmaking.aiThe 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
People
Updated 07/13/26 · By grantmaking.aiTeam Member
Track Record
Track record (Feb–July 2026 only):
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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
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In progress: current similar appeal with church members.
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40+ Bundestag briefings completed; cross-party (CDU, SPD, Grüne, Linke)
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National radio appearance (Deutschlandfunk), long-form interview with tech magazine 1E9, coverage of the appeal in the newsletter of national newspaper “Die Zeit”
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New local chapters: Berlin, Würzburg, Nürnberg, München;
Discussion
The returns I have heard for the German branch are almost all really good (maybe I am biased because I am from the French branch).
They seems doing great work with very little funding, I would strongly recommend there work however.
Hey!
Severin T. Seehrich here. I'm one of the contractors this grant would fund. I have occasionally supported Benjamin with PA tasks over the past year, e.g. grantwriting and the last PauseAI Germany newsletter. So we already know how we work together.
My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/severin-t-seehrich-855123201/
Past projects:
- Ithaka Berlin, a Berlin-based EA Hotel-style co-working/-living space dedicated to AI safety. Didn't work out due to the FTX crash and because we spent a little bit too much energy on making the perfect plan and too little on launching and iterating quickly and cheaply.
Project proposal: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Yt8jv8Fby6R9DrEg7/the-berlin-hub-longtermist-co-living-space-plan
Post-mortem: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Yt8jv8Fby6R9DrEg7/the-berlin-hub-longtermist-co-living-space-plan?commentId=GzzpP7EBajZG2YNwB - Interim Community Coordinator for EA Berlin Jan - Jun 2023 after that project failed, in order to crowdsource some of what the hub was supposed to deliver by building the EA Berlin community into a lively social scene. Track record in that time:
- Coordinating the EA Berlin core team together with Manuel Allgaier while it grew from 2-3 volunteers to a group of 6+ committed organizers.
- Launching a Telegram group that became EA Berlin’s main communication channel for event announcements and coordinating activities from co-working to hangouts. (Now 670 members.)
- (Helping) launch various event series. In consequence, we had 1-2 EA events per week for different target audiences at the end of my activities there, with on average ~10-20 attendees each. Among those, the Effective Animal Advocacy meetup lives to this day.
I left the AI safety ecosystem in 2023 after burnout, travelled the world, built a coaching practice, and organized a couple one-off events for the Paris rationalist scene plus, for the past three months, a weekly dinner. Now, I would like to dedicate as much of my time as possible to AI safety again. This time on the policy side, because I'm not aware of any technical work that I'm confident will solve superalignment or gradual disempowerment in time if we don't slow down considerably.
As the CEO of PauseAI, I endorse this project. Ben and PauseAI Germany are doing exceptional work.
Private comment. Only shown to approved funders and grant reviewers.
As a recent volunteer for PauseAI Germany, I can say that the leadership Team is highly effective. On a shoestring budget they have started multiple Germany-wide writing-campaigns, briefed many people in leadership positions (journalists, lawmakers, professors) and coordinated various local meetups and speaking engagements. A little extra funding would go a long way towards improving the social media presence, activating new volunteers and growing the org as a whole.
PauseAI Germany has done impressive work without any substantial funding. In particular their petition signed by 152 German professors and 40+ briefings of members of the Bundestag.
They should be given the opportunity to show what they can do with more funding.
When I met with Ben at EA London, I told him about being an AI Policy Strategy Fellow at Successif and that each fellow has to do their own advocacy project. Ben instantly asked about the possibility of fellows choosing to do a project for PauseAI. I shared the idea with the Successif team and made an introduction. Within two weeks, Ben joined our seminar and shared a website with great advocacy ideas informed by his experience that people could do for PauseAI or on their own. Several people decided to go with the outlined projects. This also created an idea to make more partnerships like that for the next cohort so people have an option of either doing their own project or choosing one requested by an AI safety and governance org. People behind the project are often as important as the project itself, and this showed me that Ben spots opportunities, builds things to make them happen, and catalyses action in people.