Fly two volunteer leaders of PauseAI Australia to PauseCon London, to bring UK's learnings home and train our all-volunteer chapter
Fly two volunteer leaders of PauseAI Australia to PauseCon London, to bring UK's learnings home and train our all-volunteer chapter
Project Details
Updated 07/12/26 · Edited by orgPauseAI Australia got founded last year and has been run by volunteers ever since. We coordinate with PauseAI Global and other national chapters.
The core team of 7 regular volunteers is putting in ~40 hours a week total, yet has no advocacy background and is self-taught. We are self-funded and have received no grants.
Sending two volunteers to PauseCon to learn from the best will let them teach remaining volunteers the skills, and expand PauseAI Australia to affect Australia's policy. At least one member will be an existing director. Ideal funding lets us send three volunteers.
Volunteers will within 4 weeks of PauseCon deliver a training session available to all Australian volunteers, and book at least 10 MP meetings within the following 6 months.
Theory of Impact
Updated 07/12/26 · By grantmaking.aiGlobal treaties are a coordination problem. While the most impactful countries are the US and China, middle powers can form coalitions and nudge the superpowers onto a safer trajectory for AI development. This was the topic of many sessions at the recent Australian AI Safety Forum 2026.
Sent volunteers will learn the playbook from PauseAI UK and other attending organisations that are more mature, then we teach other volunteers in Australia.
We have met with >20 Federal and state politicians across the major parties, on zero budget. We referred OpenAI to the Australian Federal Police and Attorney General, which got coverage in the ACS's Information Age, a national tech industry outlet. Our media outreach led to 4 other news articles. We coordinated 5 Senator signatures to the Superintelligence Statement. We advocated for over a year for Australia to have an AISI, and for it to focus on existential risk. The AISI has now been launched, and one of its three stated aims is catastrophic and existential risk.
A social movement is essential for x-risk policy change (lesswrong.com/posts/aoqhszdEWqcFWbnda/existential-ai-safety-needs-an-effective-social-movement) and we are the core of that movement in Australia.
People
Updated 07/12/26 · By grantmaking.aiTeam Member
Funding Details
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- Seeking first grant.
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Discussion
I think it would be very valuable to have organizers from PauseAI Australia attend PauseCon.
Previous PauseCons have demonstrated that local chapters often get a big boost from attending the conference.
After PauseCon London, PauseAI Germany came away from the event with renewed purpose and went on to organize a petition signed by 150 German professors.
PauseCon Brussels initiated a new PauseAI chapter in Belgium and inspired PauseAI Czech and other European chapters to begin lobbying MEPs to support AI safety.
I'm prepared to endorse this at the minimum budget ($5k). I appreciate the challenges for local chapters now that limited funding is available from the global movement. I see great value in having Australian participation at PauseCon London, as the lead volunteers have not had advocacy training until now but seem to still be effective at engaging with parliamentary representatives (MPs). I would be interested to learn how your strategy will evolve now that the AISI has launched.
If support for London accommodation is available from PauseCon, that would be helpful. In case of any remaining budget allocation, I would propose that PauseAI Australia allocate the remaining budget towards local travel expenses for advocacy with MPs and coordination with AISI.
Grateful if you can confirm:
- Did you receive funding from anywhere since submitting this application, or has the funding ask changed for any other reason?
- Please confirm your commitment to post quarterly updates on how the project is going.
I look forward to learning more about your evolving national strategy after PauseCon. Congratulations.
Thank you for recommending this grant, @Mark Aiken
@Peter Horniak, I have offered the granting budget to Mark, so this if you still want this grant - the 5k is on offer. Please respond to the questions above
Hi @Mark Aiken and @Anton Makiievskyi 🔸, thank you both. We would like to accept the $5,000. Our plan has changed since submitting, covered under question 1 below.
The deliverables are the same. The PauseCon attendee organises our Perth group, and confirmed in writing that he will deliver the training session within 4 weeks. The 10 MP meetings within 6 months remains a chapter commitment that I will hold us to.
On your questions:
- We received no funding from any source since submitting. The plan change: We are sending one leader rather than two, and no director will attend. I planned to attend, but we are now running a public awareness event outside the Australia AI Summit in Melbourne 7 September, which clashes with PauseCon. Two of our other directors are attending this, the last has family commitments. Only one of our remaining team could make the PauseCon dates.
Our expected spend drops to roughly US$3,000 with the one attendee. - I confirm, we will post quarterly updates here. We also publish monthly updates on pauseai.info/australia-progress.
On the remainder: domestic travel is a small cost for us, since volunteers meet their own MPs locally and our Canberra volunteers cover Parliament House meetings on request. The likely uses would be public liability insurance and equipment for local events. If you would prefer that we stay in the original scope, we are happy to return the remaining funds instead.
On strategy now that AISI has launched:
- We want its aim of existential and catastrophic risk written into its governing documents and funding, rather than living in an Aims slide from the AI Safety Forum.
- We want the AISI resourced to deliver on that aim. We already raised this at two meetings since the AI Safety Forum.
Happy to go ahead with this plan if you are.
@Peter Horniak⏸️🔸
Thanks Peter, agree to the amended proposal, with 1 conference attendee and the remaining funds used in support of consultations with MPs and local advocacy events.
@Mark Aiken thank you
@Peter Horniak⏸️🔸 you should receive the instructions to create a manifund page shortly
Getting Australians to events is difficult and expensive, but Australia is well positioned overall to be both receptive to Pause AI arguments and act as a middle power in AI dynamics. so this seems overall worthwhile in terms of expected downstream impact. Given I generally buy Pause AI's ToC and have been impressed with the Australian chapter, easy endorse.