Archive

Bring your laptop and your climbing shoes. Work on AI safety projects in good company, then boulder together.

Presentation by Benoît Dupont (Canada Research Chair in Cyber-Resilience, UdeM). Analysis of 160+ cybercriminal forum conversations: how hackers perceive and exploit AI, their doubts, and the implications for security.

Meeting of the AI safety community of practice.

Participatory workshop (game format) on five issues of generative AI: information reliability, personal data, intellectual property, algorithmic bias, environmental impact. Registration required.

Reading circle of the OBVIA Cybersecurity & Cyberjustice axis. Presentation by Félix Tréguer, response by Benoît Dupont.

Coworking session for anyone working on AI safety or governance, followed by bouldering at Bloc Shop Mile-Ex. Entry ~$13 on Fridays. Bring your own lunch.

Presentation by Rashid Mushkani (UdeM + Mila). Discussion on who decides model behavior and by what criteria.

Weekend hackathon on technical AI governance infrastructure: hardware verification, attestation systems, privacy-preserving compliance proofs, risk threshold frameworks, and international coordination mechanisms. Organized with Apart Research. $2,000 USD in prizes + fast-tracks to Lucid Computing, MIRI TGT, and Apart Fellowship.

Presentation by Ariane Ollier-Malaterre (Canada Research Chair in Digital Regulation at Work, ESG-UQAM). Based on 58 qualitative interviews, her book explores how Chinese citizens make sense of and live with pervasive digital surveillance — their imaginaries, coping strategies, and the psychological weight of constant surveillance exposure.

Screening of Writing Doom, a ~30-minute short film on AI, followed by discussion. Hosted by PauseAI Montréal.

48-hour hackathon on AI manipulation defense — building benchmarks, detection systems, and mitigations for sycophancy, deception, sandbagging, reward hacking, and dark patterns. Organized with Apart Research. $2,000 USD in prizes + fast-track to the Apart Fellowship and presentation at IASEAI'26 in Paris.

Presentation by Joaquim Streicher, Ph.D. candidate in Neuroscience and co-founder of MONIC (Montreal Initiative for Consciousness science). Addresses AI consciousness: current expert consensus, the challenge of distinguishing true consciousness from imitation, risks of false positives and negatives, and lessons from consciousness testing in unresponsive patients.

Presentation by Taylor Lynn Curtis, Mila researcher on misinformation. Explores AI systems designed for persuasion, then introduces Veracity — a real-world tool using AI to ensure data quality and detect misinformation. Closes with implications for responsible AI governance.

Discussion of Scheffer et al.'s 2009 Nature review on critical transitions in complex systems. Despite mechanistic differences, systems approaching tipping points share generic early-warning signals — rising autocorrelation, increased variance — rooted in "critical slowing down". Facilitated by Orpheus, with implications for AI governance.

Activity led by Emma Kondrup. Examining pessimistsarchive.org — newspaper headlines across technological eras (automobile, radio, TV) — to interrogate AI exceptionalism: are AI's differential traits truly consequential enough to justify unique governance responses, and what would sufficient differences look like for future AGI/ASI?

Coworking session for anyone working on AI safety or governance — research, engineering, policy, or field-building. Light collaboration or quiet focus.

48-hour hackathon on defensive acceleration (def/acc): building technology to protect against pandemics, cybercrime, and powerful AI. Organized with Apart Research. $20,000 USD in prizes. Registration through Apart Research's event page required.

Introduction to Neuronpedia (neuronpedia.org): sparse autoencoders, features, and feature pages. Live demo exploring a model slice — searching features, running activation tests, and discussing standards of evidence. Closes with paths to contribution.

Workshop to co-design a National Citizens' Assembly on Superintelligence for Canada. Participants align on mandate, stakeholders, and public input mechanisms, producing draft outputs: a Concept Note, a Consortium Intent Memo, and an invite list.

Coworking session for anyone working on AI safety or governance — research, engineering, policy, or field-building. Light collaboration or quiet focus.

How does Canada's 2025 federal budget address AI risk? Discussion mapping the AI-related budget items to threat models — power concentration, epistemics, bio, autonomy, misuse, systemic risk, and more.

Reading group discussion of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Yudkowsky and Soares, hosted by Jeremy. Guided by questions suggested by the authors on the three core claims: that superhuman AI is buildable, that the default outcome is extinction, and that it can still be prevented.

Coworking session for anyone working on AI safety — research, engineering, policy, or field-building. Light collaboration or quiet focus.

Coworking session for anyone working on AI safety — research, engineering, policy, or field-building. Light collaboration or quiet focus.

Walkthrough of the First Key Update of the International AI Safety Report (Oct 14, 2025): rapid gains in maths, coding, and scientific assistance from post-training reasoning techniques; the emergence of longer-horizon tool-using agents; and implications for bio/cyber risks, controllability, and labour markets.

Coworking session for anyone working on AI safety — research, engineering, policy, or field-building. Light collaboration or quiet focus.

Launch event for If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Yudkowsky and Soares (ifanyonebuildsit.com) — a case for why current paths toward superhuman AI could end in catastrophe. Opens with a primer on the book's arguments, followed by discussion and Q&A on technical, policy, and institutional risk-reduction.

Coworking session for anyone working on AI safety — research, engineering, policy, or field-building. Light collaboration or quiet focus.

What should "AGI" mean and how could we measure it? Presentation of agidefinition.ai, which operationalizes AGI as matching the cognitive versatility of a well-educated adult using the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) model — decomposing intelligence into ten abilities with concrete benchmark tasks.

Nik Lacombe introduces the PauseAI movement and its Montréal group (pauseai.ca/montreal). PauseAI aims to mitigate AI risks by convincing governments to pause the development of superhuman AI.

Olivier Coutu presents aisafety.info: an introduction to existential risks from AI, a 300+ article FAQ, a friendly chatbot named Stampy, and a dataset of AI alignment resources. Initiated by Rob Miles and sustained by volunteers.

Discussion of the Global Call for AI Red Lines (red-lines.ai), launched at UNGA-80 by Nobel laureates, former heads of state, and AI pioneers including Yoshua Bengio. The initiative urges governments to negotiate by end of 2026 an international agreement prohibiting the most dangerous AI uses and behaviors.

Evan Lombardi discusses how social media algorithms harm mental health and how AI amplifies these effects. Covers recommendation systems, dark patterns, deepfakes, and the mis/disinformation ecosystem, grounded in the Cambridge study "Algorithms, Addiction, and Adolescent Mental Health". Closes with an introduction to the Unplug Project.

Coworking session for anyone working on AI safety — research, engineering, policy, or field-building. Light collaboration or quiet focus.

Samuel Gélineau presents Parity Bot (gelisam.com/parity-bot): demonstrating that a neural network can be formally verified to satisfy a safety property on all inputs, by adapting a range analysis algorithm from classical code verification to neural network weights.

Coworking session for anyone working on AI safety — research, engineering, policy, or field-building. Light collaboration or quiet focus.

Orpheus presents the core ideas from "Towards Guaranteed Safe AI: A Framework for Ensuring Robust and Reliable AI Systems" (arxiv.org/abs/2405.06624), followed by Q&A and open discussion.

Discussion of section 2.1 of the International AI Safety Report (January 2025) on risks from malicious use. Part of the AIGS Canada network.