Track Record

We delivered the first PauseAI conference, PauseCon, on behalf of PauseAI Global, bringing together around 60 volunteers from around the world for the first time and training them to be better organisers and communicators. We welcomed a range of excellent guest speakers from the AI safety community, including Connor Leahy, Rob Miles, David Krueger and Kat Woods.

PauseAI Germany, among others, came away from the event with renewed purpose and went on to organise a petition signed by 150 German professors. One volunteer, Didier Coeurnelle, was inspired to initiate and fund the next PauseCon in Brussels.

We published an open letter signed by over 60 UK politicians, in response to Google DeepMind failing to uphold its AI safety commitments. Several of the MPs who signed later spoke in the Westminster Hall debate that we helped to organise in December.

The article in TIME that broke the story established for the first time that Google DeepMind did not provide the UK AISI with pre-deployment access to Gemini 2.5 Pro. Notably, Google did provide AISI with pre-deployment access to Gemini 3 Pro a couple of months after the letter was published.

Throughout the year, we regularly held social events, which helped to strengthen the sense of community that keeps people actively involved in PauseAI for months and years. One highlight was the book launch party for If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies in September.

We held a screening in the UK Parliament of filmmaker Michaël Trazzi's documentary about SB-1047, the proposed California AI legislation. This helped to educate MPs and Peers about the sorts of AI legislation that could be in the UK bill, and the battle with Big Tech that they should expect to face.

We proposed and helped to organise a Westminster Hall debate in Parliament on AI Safety. We wrote a memo which was sent out to all MPs prior to the debate and also helped to draft some proposition speeches, putting us in a strong position to work with those MPs when proposing amendments to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill.

We delivered the next PauseCon in Brussels on behalf of Global and again ran two days of training workshops for PauseAI organisers from around the world.

The final day included a public conference in the European Parliament, featuring several prominent speakers, including:

• Professor Stuart Russell, author of the authoritative textbook on AI.
• Brando Benifei MEP, primary architect of the EU AI Act.
• Victor Negrescu MEP, Vice-President of the European Parliament.
• Risto Uuk, Head of European Policy at the Future of Life Institute.

Brando Benifei discussed the strengths and limitations of the EU AI Act candidly and argued that the Act is not merely a product regulation, but that the code of practice can be extended to cover internal deployment within AI companies. We hope that PauseAI will be able to work with Mr Benifei to help see such changes implemented.

Many volunteer projects were initiated over the weekend and several attendees have since held meetings with their own MEPs to follow up on the issues discussed.