You're pledging to donate if the project hits its minimum goal and gets approved. If not, your funds will be returned.
$500,000 left to reach the funding goal.
IASER launched in July 2026 and already has more than 100 members. We are raising up to $500,000 to turn that community's expertise and willingness to contribute into sustained research, practical guidance and responsible AI training.
IASER - the Islamic Alliance for Safe, Ethical, and Responsible AI - brings together AI practitioners, researchers, scholars and community leaders. Our mission is to encourage beneficial AI and prevent harmful uses, grounded in Islamic values and open to cooperation with others who share those goals.
We already have work to build on: JaleesBench and its multi-tradition extension FaithfulBench; JaleesWeights post-training experiments; Ansari, a free Islamic AI assistant; a guidebook and research programme on ethical challenges facing Muslim technology professionals; and practical AI workshops for imams and community leaders.
Our main organisational bottleneck is the capacity to direct and support contributors. Many members have expressed interest in working on projects, but we have not yet had enough coordination and project-management capacity to turn all that interest into clear assignments, supported teams and reliable delivery. Technical expertise and community interest are present; sustained execution needs resources.
This campaign funds IASER as an organisation. It will help establish dedicated delivery capacity, support reviewed research and useful services, expand practical training, and share findings with the people who can act on them.
Our goal is to make IASER a dependable institution connecting AI expertise, Islamic scholarship and community needs. Over the proposed 12-month period, we will prioritise four connected areas.
Give interested members a clear route from joining IASER to contributing useful work. For prioritised projects, establish a lead, scoped assignments, realistic milestones, review responsibilities and a place to record progress. Dedicated coordination will help match people to tasks, resolve blockers and follow work through to completion.
We will prioritise the portfolio against available capacity rather than launch every possible initiative at once. Funding will also support maintaining and sharing completed work, so outputs remain useful after their initial release.
Advance AI evaluation, community-aligned systems and responsible deployment through JaleesBench, FaithfulBench, JaleesWeights and Ansari. Priorities include human and scholarly review, reproducible methods, reliable service operation, and clear publication of findings and limitations.
The broader research value is evidence about model behaviour, evaluation reliability and robustness under pressure. Improvements in faith-specific counsel are valuable on their own terms, but do not by themselves demonstrate protection against catastrophic AI failures. We will distinguish measured findings from claims about wider safety benefits.
Develop the Islamic Ethics Guidebook for Tech Professionals, alongside research into the dilemmas Muslim professionals encounter at work. IASER's community survey is designed to inform the guidebook and the associated Islamic Ethics Framework for AI, which is a collaboration with Yaqeen Institute.
The guidebook addresses concrete issues such as algorithmic bias, surveillance and autonomous systems. Funding would support gathering practitioner input, developing and reviewing cases, producing accessible guidance, and sharing it with professionals who can use it. We will assess usefulness through practitioner feedback and examples of application, not publication alone.
Standards and policy work will be developed through bounded, reviewed outputs where the team has the capacity and relevant expertise. The Policy workstream is still forming; its remit must be defined before promising policy influence.
Build on the practical workshops developed and delivered by Dr Waleed Kadous and collaborators. Existing materials cover research, translation, communications and administration alongside hallucinations, verification and the risks AI creates for communities.
Our pilot survey of 84 imams found that more than half had adopted AI in their religious work, while fewer than half felt equipped to answer their communities' questions about it. This is a finding from that pilot sample, not a representative estimate for all imams. It points to a gap between adoption and confidence that practical training can address.
We will refine training against participants' needs, support hands-on learning and follow-up, and assess whether participants can use and evaluate AI more responsibly. This includes recognising when to verify an output or seek human expertise, rather than simply encouraging more AI use.
In the first 60 days of the funded period, the Steering Committee will prioritise the workplan and spending, confirm delivery responsibilities, and establish baselines. Quarterly reviews will examine outputs, expenditure and what users or partners are finding useful. Expansion will follow delivery evidence and actual funding.
We will publish progress against a small set of delivery and usefulness measures:
Contributors doing useful work: track the path from expressed interest to an agreed assignment, completed contribution and continued participation. Record project blockers and whether coordination resolves them. Membership growth alone will not count as success.
Prioritised projects delivered: maintain milestone and review records, distinguish completed outputs from ongoing development, and explain delays or changes in scope.
Research that can be scrutinised: publish methods, appropriate evaluation, review findings and limitations. Record negative results and regressions as well as improvements; seek feedback from relevant researchers and users.
Guidance professionals can use: document how practitioner research informs the guidebook, obtain review, and collect feedback on whether the cases help readers reason about real workplace decisions.
Training that improves practical judgment: use participant tasks and feedback before and after training, then follow up on use, confidence and verification practices. Workshop attendance and self-reported confidence are useful signals, not proof of safer behaviour on their own.
Accountable operations: report spending against the operating plan, respect restrictions on donations and update the remaining funding need when other support is received.
The initial workplan will set specific targets based on current baselines and the funds raised. A six-month review will identify what to continue, change or stop; a year-end report will account for outputs, expenditure, unresolved limitations and the next-stage plan.
We are seeking $100,000–$500,000 in organisation-wide support, with the following proposed allocation at the full $500,000 goal:
People and project delivery - $240,000. Dedicated research, engineering, operations and contributor-coordination capacity. The staffing mix will follow the prioritised workplan and actual role costs; this is not a promise to appoint every member of the leadership team or to fill a predetermined number of posts.
Technical research and evaluation - $70,000. Human evaluation, research-specific scholarly review, data preparation, experimental compute, evaluation API credits and external methodological input. These are direct research costs beyond funded staff time.
Services and shared infrastructure - $55,000. Production inference, hosting, monitoring, maintenance tooling and other direct service costs for prioritised tools, including Ansari. Experimental compute is budgeted separately above.
Guidebook, practitioner research and standards - $40,000. Practitioner evidence gathering, case development, content review, production and bounded standards work. Distinct from the technical output-scoring budget.
Imam training and community programmes - $35,000. Workshop delivery costs, training materials, participant support and follow-up evaluation. Scope will reflect actual demand, partners and delivery capacity.
Communications and dissemination - $30,000. Accessible research summaries, results websites, newsletters, publication support and targeted engagement with practitioners, AI-safety communities and potential collaborators. No event invitation or partnership is presumed.
Governance, finance and administration - $30,000. Accounting, financial reporting, appropriate legal and organisational support, and other necessary administrative costs. Any fiscal-host or payment charges must be confirmed within this allocation rather than assumed away.
Total: $500,000.
These are proposed planning allocations, not supplier quotes or agreed employment contracts. The approved operating plan will identify named responsibilities, real costs and any mandatory payment-related expenses. Staff time and contractor work will be scoped to avoid counting the same work in multiple categories.
At $100,000: prioritise a focused first phase - coordination of existing contributors, essential service continuity and the most deliverable reviewed output. Narrow the portfolio and staffing commitments; do not attempt the full annual programme at one-fifth of the budget.
At $250,000: support dedicated delivery capacity and a selected combination of technical work, professional guidance and training, with a costed workplan identifying what is deferred.
At $500,000: resource the broader 12-month plan above, subject to recruitment, delivery performance and the Steering Committee's approved priorities.
Each scenario will be costed before funds are committed. We will not charge the same time or expense to multiple awards. Funding received elsewhere for activities in this campaign will be reflected in our reported resources, restrictions and remaining need.
IASER launched in July 2026 and has grown to 100+ members, many interested in contributing to its projects. Its leadership combines technical AI experience, scholarship, nonprofit management, education and organisational strategy. IASER is run by a Steering Committee and guided by an Islamic Advisory Board; membership of either body does not imply paid or full-time participation.
Dr Waleed Kadous: AI engineer with 25+ years of experience and 40+ patents. Founded Google's Android location team, led machine learning at Uber, ran AI Engineering at Canva, and created Ansari and the “AI for Imams” course. Coauthor of JaleesBench and FaithfulBench; author of the JaleesWeights working paper.
Dr Mohammed Ansari: senior applied scientist at Amazon, with a PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin–Madison; active in community technology initiatives and AI literacy.
Dr Agnes Chong: nonprofit leader and philanthropy researcher; former Vice President of the American Muslim Community Foundation, with programme leadership experience at CAIR and a doctorate from Stanford Law School.
Bara Elhag: account executive and go-to-market consultant for high-growth B2B SaaS companies, with management-consulting experience at IQVIA.
Abdus-Sami Hoda: educator and technology-leadership consultant; Head of Curriculum at Ummatics Institute and founder of Mubeen Institute.
Hassan Kazi: management consultant with Deloitte and Accenture experience and executive education at Wharton and Oxford's Saïd Business School; Director of the Centre for Islamic Knowledge and a board member of Justice For All Canada.
Dr Mohamed AbuTaleb: Vice President of Research at Yaqeen Institute and adjunct faculty at Boston Islamic Seminary; holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT and an Alimiyyah qualification from Al-Salam Institute; previously imam and resident scholar of the Islamic Association of Raleigh for eight years.
Shaykh Umer Khan: mufti, educator and executive member of the Fiqh Council of North America; Chief Information Officer and SVP of Software Engineering at Relativity Space; formerly Vice President of Information Technology and Security at SpaceX.
JaleesBench and FaithfulBench: public research on AI counsel, faith-sensitive evaluation and behaviour under pressure, extending from one tradition to a multi-tradition framework.
JaleesWeights: an implemented post-training recipe with documented experiments, evaluation procedures and reproducibility resources. Findings remain preliminary; a preprint is not a claim of peer-reviewed validation.
Ansari: a free Islamic AI assistant created by Dr Kadous and adopted as an IASER project, with a public codebase.
Guidebook and practitioner research: the Islamic Ethics Guidebook for Tech Professionals and accompanying community survey, with an associated ethics-framework programme. The projects page lists intended launches in December 2026 and 2027 respectively; these are plans, not completed publications.
AI for Imams and Muslim Community Leaders: a recorded six-hour hands-on workshop presented by Dr Waleed Kadous and Dr Hidayath Ansari, with slides, resources and practical coverage of AI use and verification.
Further public engagement: Facing the Fitnah of AI, Your Voice, Amplified, Rising to the Challenge of AI, and Can We Measure the Iman Impact of AI?.
Some initiatives and teaching materials predate IASER's formal launch. They demonstrate the team's experience and the work IASER can build on, rather than imply every output was produced by the new organisation after July.
Leadership biographies: https://iaser.ai/about
The main risk is that we spread a capable but lightly supported community across too many initiatives. Membership and enthusiasm do not automatically produce reliable work. Without prioritisation, contributors can lack clear assignments, projects can stall, and leadership can spend its time responding to immediate needs rather than finishing useful outputs.
Funding addresses that constraint, but does not remove execution risk. Recruitment may be slower than expected, review capacity may be limited, research results may not generalise, or a resource may attract interest without helping its intended users. The imam survey is an early signal of a training need, not proof that any particular workshop format will solve it.
We will manage these risks through a limited set of funded priorities, named owners, staged spending and quarterly delivery reviews. We will check that volunteer coordination results in completed work, that training improves practical skills, and that research and guidance receive substantive review. We will narrow or stop activities that are not useful rather than continue them because they were announced.
If fundraising is below the full goal, IASER will operate a smaller programme, with revised commitments communicated to supporters. If a research approach fails, a clear account of its limitations may still be a valuable output. If funded activities cannot continue, we will notify supporters and Manifund and handle unspent funds in accordance with the grant terms.
We officially launched in July 2026 and have only recently begun fundraising as an organization. Our early progress has been supported by contributor effort and builds on work developed by our founding team.
Since launch, IASER has attracted more than 100 members. This campaign is intended to establish the delivery capacity needed to support contributors, coordinate projects, and sustain our research, guidance, and training programmes.
We are developing funding proposals and donor relationships. Pending applications and discussions are not included in the amount raised; we will update this page as funding is confirmed and received.