grantmaking.ai Launch Round
This is an independent, weekly Australian podcast on AI, covering frontier risk, governance, and the power that determines it all. It fills a critical gap: AI safety discourse is dominated by men in countries with leading frontier labs. Australia is a G20 economy making generationally-consequential decisions with some of the lowest public trust in AI in the OECD. There is basically no trusted public discourse on catastrophic AI risk covering the local context or situating Australia within the global context. The hosts are trusted influencers, non-partisan, and already known to a decision-maker audience: they have the influence, and now want to extend their reach to everyone making crucial decisions about managing existential AI risk Down Under.
With this grant, we’ll produce and distribute a weekly episode (captioned audio + video), plus short-form clips and a newsletter. This grant changes our ability to do this consistently: the funding pays our producer who is currently working for free, ensures we can publish without interruption, funds strategic audience growth, and allows us to upgrade equipment so that the production quality matches the quality of the discourse. Episodes will be shared across all major platforms (Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts), social media (LinkedIn, TikTok, Threads, and Instagram), and via newsletter.
We’re committed to covering the most urgent and impactful debates happening in AI risk that affect the Australian public. We’ve already published on sovereign AI, technofeudalism, the economics of Australian data centres, and AI use in human resources, with episodes coming on feminist AI, labour rights, and algorithmic polarisation.
We’re a small but influential co-host team: Aubrey Blanche, the founder of The Mathpath has spent 11 years scaling two of Australia’s most influential technology companies after holding multiple roles at Palantir. A globally renowned expert in equitable organisational design and the ethics of technology, she is regularly sought out to comment on issues affecting global technology and regularly keynotes stages in Australia, the US, and the UK. Kara Bombell, the co-founder of EthicAi, is recognised as one of the Top 10 AI Problem Solvers in Australia, sits on the Governance Institute’s AI panel, and has more than a decade of experience across technical and operational delivery. This grant allows them to add a paid producer to the team.
We intend to achieve growth targets with the specific goal of influencing decision-makers setting the direction of AI safety policy and practice in Australia:
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40+ episodes produced and released, each including video, transcripts, clips, and a newsletter feature
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750 podcast subscribers (base case) or 1,200 podcast subscribers (ideal case)
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1,500 newsletter subscribers (base case) or 2,500 subscribers (ideal case)
The bAIbes reduces risk from advanced AI through the pathway this fund already backs for media work: informed public and decision-maker debate is an upstream input to AI governance, and governance is one of the few levers that can slow or shape a dangerous race. We operate at the front of that chain, in a geography the field neglects.
The chain we're betting on: frontier AI is built by a handful of labs and governments, but constrained (or not) by the political and social licence around them; that licence is set by what informed publics and, above all, decision-makers believe is at stake; and Australia is an influential middle power making live calls on sovereign AI, data-centre build-out, and privacy law while having almost no trusted public discourse on catastrophic AI risk. That is a real gap in the global map. The bAIbes reaches exactly the audience that moves this lever: governance, policy, HR and founder leaders: We are two credible, non-partisan messengers rather than hype or doom. Trust is the scarce input, and it's what we have. Sustained expert conversation shifts that audience from treating AI as a productivity story to treating it as a governance and human-control problem, building the constituency that makes real guardrails politically possible. We have 20+ years of experience operating and scaling category-defining technology companies and are some of the most trusted names in responsible technology in Australia.
Two of our recurring themes map directly onto recognised existential-risk strands: concentration of power (who controls frontier AI, sovereign-AI dependence, and the erosion of meaningful human oversight) and governance failure, the widening gap between capability, and the rules meant to contain it.
We're deliberately calibrated: no single podcast reduces existential risk on its own, and we won't claim it does. What we do is occupy a neglected, high-leverage node: trusted media, a decision-maker audience, a country with no other voice doing this work, and move the discourse that governance ultimately rests on. We'll track leading indicators of that: reach among policy and governance professionals, growth on executive-dense channels (61% of our first-month growth came via LinkedIn), institutional inbound, and evidence that episodes shift how Australian decision-makers frame frontier risk.
The grant funds the production and distribution of The bAIbes: an independent, weekly Australian podcast that brings frontier AI risk, safety, and governance into serious public conversation. In our FY27 (July '26 - June '27) model, grant income is upside that isn't baselined against sponsorship (which does not yet exist), so every dollar here directly accelerates output and reach.
The largest line is a dedicated producer — the person currently doing our weekly editing, distribution, and social clips unpaid. Funding that role is what guarantees consistent output. The remainder covers tools and hosting to align the quality of content with the quality of production, transcription and accessibility, audience-growth campaigns that extend each episode's reach to decision-makers.
Minimum: AUD $32,890 (~USD $21,400): a full year of lean, professional weekly production. The producer is paid a fair stipend and the show will not go dark while sponsorship ramps. This alone sustains the only podcast of its kind in an under-served region for AI-safety public discourse.
Ideal: AUD $73,370 (~USD $47,700): the full professional season. Market-rate producer, a real audience-growth budget, fully uplifted video production for YouTube reach, and modest host stipends. This maximises how many policymakers and decision-makers each frontier-risk episode reaches. At the fund's cap, a single grant covers our entire year.
Full line-item breakdown, in AUD with USD equivalents, is in the linked budget: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_hSlom3IGXd84qXxqbPvK_vI_G5A3n4xX1Zr7yxGD3I/edit?usp=sharing