We’re funding events to help people make sense of AI risk

By Harry Waterman, Joshua Landes @ 2026-10-03T00:00 (+21)

Have you become your circle's "what's going on with AI?" person?

Since the Hugging Face incident and the run of recent high-profile departures from AI labs, thousands of people have told us they want to get up to speed on AI safety. 

Here at BlueDot Impact, course applications are up some 30%, grant applications have doubled, and we, like the rest of the field, are thinking hard about how to bring exceptional new people into AI safety fast.

So we’ve decided to run an experiment: BlueDot is funding local events to help people understand recent developments, talk through what they mean, and work out what they can do.

We're most excited about proposals from people who:

1. Are passionate and well-informed about catastrophic risk from AI;
2. Know who they want in the room; and
3. Know what they want participants to leave with.

Here are some of the events we’ve funded so far:

• Palo Alto: an evening at a community center helping local families understand AI risk.
• Brussels: a briefing on catastrophic AI risk for 100 policy professionals, with a talk, discussion and reception.
• Barcelona: an evening at Barcelona4Impact, co-hosted with AI Safety Barcelona, on making sense of catastrophic AI risk.
• Bonn: a workshop for mathematicians on where their specialties fit into open problems in AI safety, at a moment when many of them are newly worried.
• Illinois: a campus seminar on the Hugging Face incident for around 250 students.

If you've been meaning to get people together to make sense of all this, we'd love to hear from you. We’re especially excited about 3–5 hour gatherings for a specific community, with one high-quality talk and plenty of time to discuss. 

Please apply by Thursday, October 8. Though, we'll keep considering great pitches after that. 

Find the RFE here.

Link to the application: https://bluedot.org/grants/rapid