Project summary

PauseAI US's funding fell short of expected, and now we are only funded until the end of 2024! Money donated to this project will go to fund the operations of PauseAI US until midyear 2025.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

PauseAI US advocates for an international treaty to pause frontier AI development. But we don't need to achieve that treaty to have positive impact-- most of our positive impact will likely come from moving the Overton window and making more moderate AI Safety measures more possible. Advocating straightforwardly for what we consider the best solution is an excellent frame for educating the general public and elected officials on AI danger-- we don't know what we're doing building powerful AI, so we should wait until we do to proceed-- compared to tortured and confusing discussions of other solutions like alignment that have no clear associated actions for those outside the technical field.

To fulfill our goal of moving the Overton window in the direction of simply not building AGI while it is dangerous to do so, PauseAI US has two major areas of programming: protesting and lobbying.

Protests (like this upcoming one) are the core of our irl volunteer organizing, local social community, and social media presence. Protests send the general overarching message to Pause frontier AI training, in line with the PauseAI proposal. Sometimes protests take issue with the AI industry and take place at AGI company offices like Meta, OpenAI, or Anthropic (RSVP for 11/22!). Sometimes protests are in support of international cooperative efforts. Protests get media attention which communicates not only that the protestors want to Pause AI, but shows in a visceral and easily understood way the stakes of this problem, filling the bizarre missing mood surrounding AI danger ("If AI companies are doing something so dangerous, how come there aren't people in the streets?"). Protests are a highly neglected angle in the AI Safety fight. Ultimately, the impact of protests is in moving the Overton window for the public, which in turn affects what elected officials think and do.

Organizing Director Felix De Simone is based in DC and does direct lobbying on the Hill as well as connecting constituents to their representatives for grassroots lobbying. Felix holds regular email- and letter-writing workshops for the general public on the PauseAI US Discord (please join!) aimed at specific events, such as emailing and calling the California Assembly and Senate during the SB-1047 hearings and, more recently, workshops coordinating supportive emails expressing hope about the possibility of a global treaty to pause frontier AI development to attendees of the US AI Safety Conference. We work with SAG-AFTRA representatives to coordinate with their initiatives and add an x-risk dimension to their primarily digital identity and provenance-related concerns. PauseAI US is part of a number of other more speculative legal interventions to Pause AI, such as working with Gabriel Weil to develop a strict liability ballot initiative version of SB-1047 and locate funders to get it on the 2026 ballot. We are members of Coalition for a Baruch Plan for AI and Felix attended the UN Summit for the Future Activist Days. We hope to be able to serve as a plaintiff in lawsuits against AI companies that our attorney allies are developing, a role which very few others would be willing or able to fill. Lobbying is more of a nitty gritty approach, but the goal of our lobbying is the same as our protesting: to show our elected officials that cooperation to simply not build AGI is possible, because the will and the ways are there.

How will this funding be used?

Salaries - $260k/year
Specific Events - ~$7.5-15k/year
Operating costs - ~$24k/year (this includes bookkeeping, software, insurance, payroll tax, etc. and may be an overestimate for next year because there were so many startup costs this year-- if it is, consider it slack)

Through 2025 Q2 -- $150k.

Our programming mainly draws on our labor and the labor of our volunteers, so salaries are our overwhelmingly largest cost.

Q1&Q2 programming:
- quarterly protest
- monthly flyering
- monthly local community social event
- 2+ lobbying events for public education
- PauseAI US Discord (please join!) for social times, AI Safety conversation, and help with running your own local PauseAI US community
- PauseAI US newsletter
- expansion of Felix's lobbying plan, improving his relationships with key offices

Org infrastructure work by Q2:
(This one is massive. We just hired Lee Green to run ops.)
- massively improved ops and legal compliance leading us to be able to scale up much more readily
- website with integrated event platform streamlining our volunteer discovery and training processes and allowing us to hold more frequent and larger protests
- Executive Director able to focus on strategy and fundraising and not admin
- improved options for donating and continuous fundraising

Incidental work likely to happen by Q2:
- strict liability ballot initiative will have progressed as far as it can
- We respond to media requests for comment on major news events, may muster small demonstrations and/or orchestrate calls into key offices
- supporting other AI Safety organizations with our knowledge and connections
- lots of behind the scenes things I unfortunately can't discuss but which are a valuable part of what our org does

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

Executive Director - Holly Elmore
Founded this org, long history of EA organizing (2014-2020 at Harvard) and doing scientific research as an evolutionary biologist and then as a wild animal welfare researcher at Rethink Priorities.

Director of Operations - Lee Green
+20 years experience in Strategy Consulting, Process Engineering, and Efficiency across many industries, specifically supporting +40 Nonprofit and Impact-Driven Organizations

Organizing Director - Felix De Simone
Organized U Chicago EA and climate canvassing campaigns.