Project summary

We are the civic movement dedicated to averting the risks of superhuman artificial intelligence.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

PauseAI UK exists to transform loose public concern into a focused political force in the UK, and to hold that pressure in place long enough to matter. Deep buy-in across the public is necessary to overcome industry lobbying. The work of converting awareness into durable political will is the community organising work that PauseAI UK specialises in.

How will this funding be used?

We currently have only around 3 months of runway at our minimal expenditure, so this funding will be used to fund staff salaries and our core expenditures.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

Joseph Miller - Director

Joseph is a researcher with over four years of experience in technical AI safety. He has been organising for PauseAI UK since May 2023 when he joined the very first protest. He is currently pursuing his PhD at Oxford University alongside his work forPauseAI UK. In 2021, he created one of the first text-to-image websites, which gained over one million users in less than six months. Before that he was a software engineer and studied mathematics.

Matilda da Rui - Deputy Director

Matilda's experience includes three years contributing to the formal AI alignment ecosystem, over ten years of entrepreneurial work, and direct experience in social movement strategy, nonprofit organising, interdisciplinary research, systems-oriented design, and operations.

In the past year PauseAI UK has:

• Delivered two conferences, on behalf of PauseAI Global, bringing together volunteers from around the world, strengthening the global PauseAI community.
• Written an open letter to Demis Hassabis signed by over 60 UK politicians, establishing our political credibility and holding DeepMind to account.
• Arranged a conference in the European Parliament with speakers including Brando Benifei, the key architect of the EU AI Act and Stuart Russell, one of the world’s top AI scientists, discussing concrete steps to reduce AI extinction risk.
• Co-organised the largest AI protest in the world, with around 300 volunteers marching to the London headquarters of Google DeepMind, boosting our visibility and building towards our long-term vision of a mass movement.
• Hired a brilliant Deputy Director, Matilda da Rui, and gained many new talented and dedicated volunteers to help execute on more projects.
• Supported several volunteers in founding local groups across the UK, laying the foundations for the infrastructure that will enable us to scale.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

We are cognisant that building an AI movement in a context where many people have an incomplete understanding of the most severe risks requires caution and continual shaping of our message. Having our primary policy demand built into our name is a good safeguard against harmful distortions of our goals. In many contexts there are large short-term incentives to water down our demands and message, but we think this would reduce our long-term impact by moving our focus away from the most severe risks, so we are glad to have a name that commits us to a strong stance. We remain strictly non-partisan by focusing exclusively on our single issue and using politically neutral language.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

We have raised around £13,000 in the past two months from individual donors and members of our community.

For more details, see our donor prospectus here: https://pauseai.uk/pdfs/Donor-Prospectus.pdf