You're pledging to donate if the project hits its minimum goal and gets approved. If not, your funds will be returned.
Aperture Salon is a quarterly invitation-only discussion in San Francisco that brings together 12 senior decision-makers for guided dialogue. Aperture Salon's programming is expanding further to include a podcast format and notable Author series to scale its impact and opportunity for broader discourse.
Its goals are to broaden the AI discourse beyond researchers and technologists to key decision-makers across disciplines that are confronting the challenges of AI in our institutions, organizations, and society. The Salon is designed to enable AI safety perspectives to reach the leaders who control capital, set organizational priorities, and influence policy.
The Salon achieves this through thoughtful curation of guests, extensive discussion preparation, and discussion architecture designed to arrive at tensions quickly to benefit from the domain experts in the room. There are few other venues that will have the cross-discipline list of experts at the same table. The salon will scale its impact through a podcast format and notable author series that support more attendees.
The objective throughout is raising awareness and familiarity with senior leaders’ agency to embed accountability, safety, and humanity throughout their executive decision-making.
Funding supports the quarterly salons, podcast, and author series, including:
Food/bev, hospitality for invited participants
Venue supplies and discussion materials
Preparation of curated readings and briefing materials
AI tools for participant research, transcription, and synthesis
Podcast equipment and production
Website, communications, and publishing
Books, licensed articles, and other copyrighted pre-reading materials
Melissa Lopez founded and leads Aperture Salon.
Formerly an institutional investor serving as a Managing Director of Investments at the James Irvine Foundation, Melissa combines an institutional investor’s focus on incentives and measurable outcomes with a deep commitment to governance, public interest, and long-term societal impact. This perspective enables her to bridge technical, policy, business, and civic communities in ways that help translate AI safety into informed institutional decision-making.
She currently supports the Consulate General of Switzerland's engagement with the Bay Area AI ecosystem in preparation for the 2027 Global AI Summit in Geneva and has completed BlueDot's AGI Strategy program while continuing independent study in frontier AI governance.
Without funding, the project will continue at a small scale with limited reach. To-date, the receptivity for the salon format is exceedingly strong. Funds would support broader reach and impact.
If the project were unsuccessful, one consequence would be the loss of an emerging mechanism for translating AI safety thinking into executive and institutional decision-making. Fewer opportunities would exist for sustained, high-trust engagement between the AI safety community and the leaders responsible for implementing governance across business, government, finance, philanthropy, and media.
To date, Aperture Salon has not raised institutional funding.
The project has been founder-funded, with Melissa Lopez contributing her own time and resources to participant outreach, event hosting, discussion design, hospitality, and supporting materials.
This application represents one of the first efforts to secure philanthropic support to expand the initiative into a sustainable program.
There are no bids on this project.