IASEAI is an independent nonprofit that works to ensure AI systems operate safely and ethically by shaping policy, promoting research, and building a global community around AI safety.
IASEAI is an independent nonprofit that works to ensure AI systems operate safely and ethically by shaping policy, promoting research, and building a global community around AI safety.
People
Updated 05/18/26Member
Board Member
Affiliate Member
Member
Student Member
Member
Member & AI Ethics Advisor, International Association for AI Ethics
Funding Details
Updated 05/18/26- Annual Budget
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- Current Runway
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- Funding Goal
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- Funding Raised to Date
- $1,850,000
Org Details
Updated 05/18/26The International Association for Safe and Ethical AI (IASEAI, pronounced 'eye-see-eye') is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization incorporated in 2024. It was co-founded by Stuart Russell, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI), and Mark Nitzberg, who also serves as Executive Director of CHAI. The organization's stated mission is to ensure that AI systems are guaranteed to operate safely and ethically, and to shape policy, promote research, and build understanding and community around this goal. IASEAI works across four strategic pillars. On policy, it convenes working groups that produce position papers on AI standards, regulation, and international cooperation frameworks. On research, it promotes technical and sociotechnical safety approaches and recognizes outstanding contributions to the field. On education, it aims to reach diverse audiences including the general public, journalists, policymakers, and businesses through course development, educational videos, a speakers bureau, and media engagement. On community building, it organizes an annual international conference and regular workshops. The inaugural IASEAI conference (IASEAI '25) was held February 6-7, 2025 at the OECD La Muette Headquarters in Paris, preceding the Paris AI Action Summit. It attracted over 700 in-person attendees from 65 countries and more than 1,400 online participants across plenary sessions and tracks on global coordination, safety engineering, alignment, interpretability, manipulation, and disinformation. The second annual conference (IASEAI '26) was hosted in February 2026 at UNESCO House in Paris and brought together more than 1,300 participants from nearly 100 countries. The organization has also established an affiliate program, with organizations such as Concordia AI and the University of Kansas Institute for Information Sciences joining as affiliates. IASEAI received a general support grant of $1,850,000 from the Future of Life Institute in February 2025. The organization is headquartered at 501 W Broadway, Suite 1540, San Diego, CA 92101, and accepts direct donations via its website. The steering committee includes prominent figures such as Yoshua Bengio, Kate Crawford, Eric Horvitz, Max Tegmark, and other leading academics, technologists, and policy experts.
Theory of Change
Updated 05/18/26IASEAI believes that the development of highly capable AI represents one of the most consequential events in human history, and that current systems are being developed without adequate safeguards. By convening a high-credibility international community of researchers, policymakers, civil society representatives, and industry leaders, IASEAI works to accelerate technical AI safety research, build consensus around safety standards and governance frameworks, and increase understanding among the policymakers and public who must ultimately demand and enforce those safeguards. The causal chain runs from community-building and annual conferences that generate shared understanding, to policy working groups that produce concrete governance proposals, to international cooperation frameworks that constrain unsafe AI development, to a world in which highly capable AI systems are provably beneficial rather than catastrophically harmful.
Grants Received– no grants recorded
Updated 05/18/26Projects– no linked projects
Updated 05/18/26Discussion
Key risk: IASEAI’s broad, conference-centric agenda executed by a small early-stage team risks producing consensus papers without binding adoption—duplicating CHAI/FLI-style efforts and yielding limited counterfactual impact on x-risk.
Case for funding: With Stuart Russell/Mark Nitzberg at the helm and OECD/UNESCO-level convening power, IASEAI is unusually well positioned to turn high-credibility international gatherings and policy working groups into concrete safety standards and coordination mechanisms that could meaningfully constrain risky frontier AI development.