Scaling ControlAI's parliamentary outreach across the G7 (excl. US).

Raising $50,000active

Paying 1-8 FTE to scale ControlAI's work meeting and briefing lawmakers about extinction risk from AI and building a coalition to prohibit superintelligence across the G7 (excl. US).

Endorsed by

Ryan+3

Endorsements made here support ControlAI.

Paying 1-8 FTE to scale ControlAI's work meeting and briefing lawmakers about extinction risk from AI and building a coalition to prohibit superintelligence across the G7 (excl. US).

Endorsed by

Ryan+3

Endorsements made here support ControlAI.

Project Details

ControlAI’s goal is to prevent extinction risk from superintelligent AI (ASI) through an international agreement prohibiting the development of ASI. As a key part of this work, we systematically meet and brief lawmakers about AI extinction risk. A core distinction we draw for policymakers is: narrow AI has many benefits, but superintelligent systems that nobody can control should be prohibited.

In our experience, many lawmakers are unaware of AI risks, and without awareness they cannot act. Building this awareness is therefore a precondition for international cooperation on AI among all countries. So we directly speak with lawmakers to inform them about AI risks, and help them act.

ControlAI has a proven pipeline for briefing lawmakers on AI risks. With dedicated teams in the UK and US, and 1 FTE in both Canada and Germany, we achieve strong results across countries. For example, in Canada, 1 FTE secured 100+ lawmaker meetings in <1 year, resulting in our Canada campaign statement, which already has 30+ supporters. In the UK, we met 180+ in 18 months, with 100+ supporting our campaign.

But time is running out. Leading AI company CEOs estimate AI systems smarter than all humans are only 1-5 years away. Once they exist, it'll be too late to act. To secure an international agreement on AI extinction risk in time, we must scale up lawmaker outreach across G7 countries urgently. $50k would allow us to pay 1 FTE for around 6-8 months with an expected outcome of an additional 20-40 lawmakers briefed. And with $1m in additional funding, we could roughly double our efforts informing lawmakers across the G7 for 12 months (incl. Brussels, excl. US) and make significant progress within a year. Without it, our outreach would be limited to the current rate.

Our methods work across countries, and results scale directly with allocated funds. We will use all funding to pay 1-8 FTEs for 6-12 months (depending on the funding amount), to meet and brief lawmakers about catastrophic AI risks across the G7 (incl. Brussels, except US). Country selection will depend on external factors, e.g. local talent availability.

Theory of Impact

If artificial superintelligence (ASI) is built, we risk human extinction, no matter which organization gets there first. The solution is to prohibit anyone from reaching this level of capabilities in the first place. To do this, we need a coalition of countries that treat the development of ASI as a top national security issue on par with nuclear war, and establish credible deterrence so that no one in the world develops ASI. ControlAI builds this coalition: We focus on the US, and G7 countries, as the most likely and important initial supporters of such an agreement.

We believe the bottleneck to widespread political and public action on preventing extinction risk from ASI is awareness. If policymakers don’t know about a problem, they cannot act on it. And if the public isn’t aware of a problem, they can’t demand action from political leaders.

We have met with 400+ lawmakers in 1.5 years across 4 countries. In our experience, many lawmakers are simply unaware of AI extinction risk and ASI. Once we speak to them, most quickly grasp the problem and its dire implications. Therefore, our key objective is to make policymakers and the public of AI extinction risk, and then help them take action. The ceiling of our impact is having an international ban of superintelligence in-place, significantly reducing extinction risk from ASI. The floor is that we will have raised awareness of AI extinction risk across the board, making it possible for policymakers, citizens, and other organizations to take informed action on ASI.

People

Andrea Miotti

Team Member

Grants Received– no grants recorded

Add grant

Funding Asks

grantmaking.ai Launch Round

Applied

Minimum

$50,000

Ideal

$1,000,000

How the money will be spent

Minimum ($50,000):

$45,000: 1 FTE outreach officer, in a G7 country (excl. US), for 6-8 months. Tasks: parliamentary outreach at scale (email and phone), face-to-face meetings informing lawmakers about extinction risk from superintelligent AI
$5,000: travel, event attendances
Country selection will depend on availability of talent. We will either add capacity to our existing UK, US, Canada or Germany teams, or kickstart our work briefing lawmakers in any of the remaining G7 countries or Brussels.

Expected outcomes after 7 months at minimum funding:

20-40 additional G7 elected officials/politicians briefed

Ideal ($1,000,000, 12 months):

$800,000: remuneration for up to 8 FTEs meeting and briefing lawmakers, allocated across the G7 (incl. Brussels, except US).
$40,000: parliamentary events in G7 capitals such as Berlin, Paris, Rome, Brussels to brief representatives at scale.
$25,000: CRM and outreach software, translations, printed briefing materials.
$25,000: travel and recruiting costs
$110,000: operations and contingency, about 11%.

These are estimates. Exact remuneration will depend on local wage levels and individual candidates. But all funding will go directly towards 1-8 FTE doing work on our G7 pipelines that would otherwise not get done.

The grant would be paid out to ControlAI and earmarked for this program.

Expected outcomes after 12 months at $1m (ideal) funding:

At least one additional cross-party public campaign along the lines of the Canada and UK campaigns, with 20+signatories, calling for the regulation of superintelligent AI.
An additional 300-600 lawmakers met and briefed across the G7.

Discussion

Benjamin SchmidtEndorsement11d(edited)

What ControlAI is doing is obviously good
From my interactions with them, their team is amazing. People trying to do actually get stuff done, to win!
Working together with specifically their team in Germany (I am PauseAI Germany co-lead) is a pleasure.
Please more of this!

AAndrea Miotti5d

Thanks Benjamin!

Romain DelégliseEndorsement11d(edited)

They are doing great work and also inspire others to do good stuff in AI safety :) Advocacy is especially important and neglected so that's a good opportunity.

AAndrea Miotti5d

Thank you, Romain!

MMark AikenEndorsement10d

Endorsed!

AAndrea Miotti5d

Thanks Mark!