I am Jason Green-Lowe, the executive director of the Center for AI Policy (CAIP). Our mission is to directly convince Congress to pass strong AI safety legislation. As I explain in some detail in this post, I think our organization has been doing extremely important work, and that we’ve been doing well at it. Unfortunately, we have been unable to get funding from traditional donors to continue our operations. If we don’t get more funding in the next 30 days, we will have to shut down, which will damage our relationships with Congress and make it harder for future advocates to get traction on AI governance. In this post, I explain what we’ve been doing, why I think it’s valuable, and how your donations could help.
This is the first post in what I expect will be a 6-part series. The first post focuses on CAIP’s particular need for funding. The next few posts will lay out a more general case for why effective altruists and others who worry about AI safety should spend more money on advocacy and less money on research – even if you don’t think my organization in particular deserves any more funding, you might be convinced that it’s a priority to make sure other advocates get more funding. The final post will take a look at some institutional problems that might be part of why our movement has been systematically underfunding advocacy and offer suggestions about how to correct those problems.
OUR MISSION AND STRATEGY
The Center for AI Policy’s mission is to directly and openly urge the US Congress to pass strong AI safety legislation. By “strong AI safety legislation,” we mean laws that will significantly change AI developers’ incentives and make them less likely to develop or deploy extremely dangerous AI models. The particular dangers we are most worried about are (a) bioweapons, (b) intelligence explosions, and (c) gradual disempowerment. Most AI models do not significantly increase these risks, and so we advocate for narrowly-targeted laws that would focus their