Existential AI safety needs an effective social movement. PauseAI is building it

The existential AI safety community needs to take building a civic and social movement seriously as a core intervention. We believe this is a high-value, badly neglected approach to reducing catastrophic/x-risks from AI because it may significantly enhance the likelihood of governance efforts succeeding at keeping humanity safe.This post was written by Matilda da Rui and Maxime Fournes, with significant contributions from Benjamin Schmidt (Pause AI Germany co-lead).Note: this post is about Pause AI, not PauseAI US, which is a distinct entity with a different leadership team and approach.Executive SummaryThe existential AI safety community needs to take building a civic and social movement seriously as a core intervention. We believe this is a high-value, badly neglected approach to reducing catastrophic/x-risks from AI because it may significantly enhance the likelihood of governance efforts succeeding at keeping humanity safe. As far as we can tell, only one organisation is building this infrastructure across continents: PauseAI. This post lays out our reasoning and our track record, and makes the case that funding this work is one of the highest value-for-money contributions available to anyone looking to reduce AI risk.Why don't we already have a pause or strong controls on frontier AI? Multiple advocacy groups are communicating clear and convincing arguments for AI existential risk, and policy experts are putting forward comprehensive proposals. We need more of this work, but this work alone will not be enough, because one link is missing: what policymakers hear doesn't align with what their incentives reward. They face no political constituency that cares about existential risk.We saw this firsthand at our European Parliament conference, where an MEP told us that she agreed with us but could not act without public support. Building that constituency is what PauseAI offers to the AI safety ecosystem.Why do we think that PauseAI can deliver this constituency? On re