Reduce societal-scale risks from AI through research, field-building, and policy advocacy.
CAIS is a San Francisco nonprofit that does safety research and pushes for AI laws. It wrote the famous one-line 'extinction risk' statement and helped draft California's first frontier-AI bills.
Focus
- Alignment research
- Safety evaluations
- Transparency
- International governance
Funding, as far as we know
Open Philanthropy grants; $6.5M from FTX Future Fund (2023, later subject to clawback) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_AI_Safety
What they've actually done
Organised the one-sentence Statement on AI Risk signed by Hinton, Bengio, Altman, Amodei, Hassabis and hundreds of researchers
30 May 2023
CAIS Action Fund co-sponsored California SB 1047 (passed legislature, vetoed by Newsom Sept 2024)
7 February 2024
Released 'Humanity's Last Exam' benchmark with Scale AI to measure frontier expert-level capabilities
23 January 2025
Runs a free compute cluster and 'Intro to ML Safety' course for external safety researchers
ongoing