Pakistan AI Saftey Innitiative

Raising $15,000active

PASI will run an AI safety and advocacy campaign plus a sponsored student hackathon in Pakistan to build solutions for public needs and deliver resulting policy proposals to government.

Project Details

PASI is a result of much deliberation focused on digital inclusion of the underrepresented, which is the case with Pakistan. There is a serious lack of digital advocacy, saftey innitiative and national policy for that matter. With now AI surge, the

Plan is to design a AI saftey and Advocacy campaign mixed with attraction of AI Hackathon where college students from both Social and Emperical sciences will be brought and presented with real life problems of the common poeple of the country and find a solutions in the hackthon. Ideally the hackathon will be sponsored by AI labs so raw skill can use the power of API credits without having to fear about their pocket money as petrol is already too expensive.

Concrete output, other than awareness, advocacy, and talent acquisition, will result in solutions that will eventually be provided to the government as policy proposals for the common people of Pakistan.

Theory of Impact

Pakistan has no existing pipeline for AI governance/safety work, despite meaningful exposure to AI-driven risks. The country is talent-rich but access-poor: capable people lack compute/API access to frontier models needed to understand or red-team them. Building a talent pipeline in an underrepresented region, grounded in lived on-the-ground knowledge rather than a single triggering incident, is itself a recognized category of AI safety field-building. Supporting evidence to source: Pakistan's AI-exposed gig/content-moderation workforce size, absence of AI regulatory capacity, global AI-readiness index ranking.

People

Muhammad Umar Zafar

Team Member

Grants Received

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Funding Asks

grantmaking.ai Launch Round

Applied

Minimum

$15,000

Ideal

$36,000

How the money will be spent

Minimum (~$15-17K) bare-bones single hackathon:

- Venue + logistics (2 days, Lahore): ~$1.5K

- Food/travel stipends (30-40 participants): ~$2K

- Prizes/incentives: ~$1K

- Facilitation/mentors: ~$1.5K

- Coordination/outreach time: ~$1-1.5K

Ideal (~$36K) — hackathon + lean first-year platform:

- Hackathon, higher quality + travel support for outside-Lahore participants: ~$8-10K

- Compute/API credit partnership negotiation + possible cost-share: ~$2-3K

- Findings-document production (research support, co-author honorarium, translation/design): ~$5-6K

- Post-hackathon activity: community maintenance, dissemination to ministries/regulators, basic web presence: ~$5-6K

- Part-time coordinator support (Umar or Daadras-network person), 3-6 months: ~$10-12K

- Contingency/admin: ~$2K

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