Center for AI Policy

The Center for AI Policy (CAIP) is a nonprofit that lobbies in Washington for legislation on catastrophic risks from advanced artificial intelligence. It registered its first lobbyist in December 2023, the same season in which the similarly named Center for AI Safety, through its Action Fund, registered its own, and in that one month it spent 98,000 dollars lobbying Congress and the State Department on "issues relating to the support of mitigating catastrophic risks from advanced, general-purpose artificial intelligence."¹

Lobbying

Its lobbying was led by Kate Forscey, a former technology policy adviser to Representative Anna Eshoo of California. In February 2024 the organization was promoting a draft "Responsible AI Act," which, as Politico described it, "would hold AI developers liable for 'severe harms,' require permits to develop 'high-risk' systems and empower regulators to 'pause AI projects if they identify a clear emergency.'"¹

Funding

The executive director, Jason Green-Lowe, told Politico that about a third of the center's donations came from Lightspeed Grants, which is backed by Jaan Tallinn, the Skype co-founder who was an early investor in DeepMind and led a 2021 investment in Anthropic that included money from Dustin Moskovitz and the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. Green-Lowe called the center "fully independent of big AI labs" and said its policies "won't give those labs unfair advantages because the cost of compliance is tiny compared to the price of hardware and talent."¹

The same article quoted Suresh Venkatasubramanian of Brown University, who said of the new lobbying by the two centers: "We should discuss what the science is telling us about AI... But if they want to go lobbying, then that is a different path. It's about who has more money, and [who] wants to fund their agenda through infusions of cash from a rich doomsday cult."¹