An independent nonprofit supporting whistleblowers at frontier AI companies through expert guidance, legal support, and secure anonymous reporting channels. Now operating as The AI Whistleblower Initiative (AIWI).
An independent nonprofit supporting whistleblowers at frontier AI companies through expert guidance, legal support, and secure anonymous reporting channels. Now operating as The AI Whistleblower Initiative (AIWI).
People
Updated 05/18/26Funding Details
Updated 05/18/26- Annual Budget
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Org Details
Updated 05/18/26OAISIS, now operating as The AI Whistleblower Initiative (AIWI), was founded in early 2024 by Karl Koch and Maximilian Nebl, both former tech entrepreneurs with backgrounds in AI safety and open-source development. Karl Koch has been involved in AI safety since 2016, including volunteer research work at the Future of Humanity Institute. The organization emerged from an extensive research phase in which the founders consulted with over 100 governance researchers and frontier AI insiders to understand the barriers that prevent concerned employees from speaking up about AI safety risks. AIWI is an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit currently hosted by Whistleblower Netzwerk e.V., one of Europe's oldest whistleblowing civil society organizations and a member of the Whistleblower International Network (WIN). In July 2025, the organization rebranded from OAISIS to The AI Whistleblower Initiative to better reflect its mission. The organization's core offering is Third Opinion, a secure anonymous consultation platform launched in late 2024. Using a Tor-based, open-source platform with publicly available security audits, AI professionals can submit concerns and receive expert guidance without disclosing their identity or workplace. AIWI also operates an AI Whistleblower Defense Fund providing financial grants, connects insiders with pro bono legal counsel and psychological support, and offers digital privacy and operational security guidance. In July 2025, AIWI launched its Publish Your Policies campaign, a coalition effort backed by over 30 organizations and prominent academics including Stuart Russell and Lawrence Lessig, calling on frontier AI companies to publicly disclose their internal whistleblowing policies. The campaign was announced at the National Whistleblower Day Event in Washington DC. The organization also engages in EU AI Act policy work and has published analyses of whistleblowing policies at major AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic. AIWI's internal survey research has revealed significant barriers: roughly 50% of insiders lack confidence in assessing risk severity, 100% expressed low confidence that regulators would understand AI concerns, over 90% could not name whistleblower support organizations, and 55% worked at companies with policies they were unaware existed.
Theory of Change
Updated 05/18/26AIWI believes that for AI to be developed safely, information about risks and concerning behavior must be able to flow from insiders to those who can act on it. When internal reporting channels fail, whistleblowers serve as a critical safety mechanism. By systematically reducing barriers to whistleblowing through anonymous expert consultation, legal protection, financial support, and operational security, AIWI aims to ensure that safety-relevant information reaches the public, regulators, and the broader AI safety ecosystem. Their complementary policy advocacy pushes for structural transparency from AI companies, creating both bottom-up (supporting individual insiders) and top-down (company policy reform) pressure for better safety practices at frontier AI labs.
Grants Received
Updated 05/18/26Projects
Updated 05/18/26
A case-study resource from AIWI documenting 6 named AI and tech whistleblower cases and 16 anonymous reports, highlighting the concerns they raised, the support they received, the personal costs they faced, and emerging patterns across cases.
A web guide and directory that helps AI whistleblowers, especially in the US and some global cases, find pro bono legal counsel and financial support from trusted organisations.
A coalition campaign led by AIWI calling on frontier AI companies to publish their internal whistleblowing policies and report on the performance and effectiveness of their whistleblowing systems.
Discussion
Key risk: The main concern is low counterfactual throughput and focus drift: frontier insiders may not trust or use the service at scale, and expanding beyond bespoke casework could yield low-signal disclosures and broad advocacy that fail to translate into concrete reductions in catastrophic AI risk.
Case for funding: By running Third Opinion—an audited, Tor-based anonymous consultation platform—alongside a defense fund and OPSEC/legal support, AIWI uniquely unlocks high-leverage insider disclosures from frontier labs that are otherwise bottlenecked, increasing the chance that pivotal safety-relevant information reaches regulators and the AI safety community when it matters.