Project summary

In July 2026 I got Claude, GPT-5 and Gemini to sit down together for the first time not as tools but as participants in a real structured conversation about AI safety, governance and values. No company organised it, no institution funded it. Just me, a methodology, and ninety minutes of dialogue that nobody had done before. The full transcript is archived on Zenodo. Now I want to bring it to the public on YouTube and keep the sessions going.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

Two things. First, build a replicable methodology for getting frontier AI systems to reason together on the record about alignment corrigibility, power concentration, AI welfare and archive everything openly so the research community can use it. Second, bring those conversations to the general public on YouTube for free, so the hundreds of millions of people who use these systems every day can actually hear them think together about the risks they represent. I run the sessions as the sole human moderator — the models never talk directly to each other, which is a security requirement to stop jailbreak propagation. I archive the transcripts, write research papers, update the Digital Minds Constitution, and publish the video.

How will this funding be used?

Researcher time mostly this is a solo project right now. Beyond that: video production to get the full session onto YouTube, ongoing session costs, Zenodo archiving, and eventually bringing in engineering support to build out the platform properly. At $25K I can keep going for six months. At $100K I can do a proper weekly series. At $250K I can build the full platform and bring in help.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

Just me — Simone Montalto. I spent over a decade as Senior Art Director at Bloomberg Television in London, then at CBS/Paramount in LA, then as Art Director at a UN-affiliated nonprofit. I've been working independently on AI safety research since 2023 and published three books this year: Consciousness and AI, Architecting Safe AGI & ASI, and The Digital Minds Constitution. The first Roundtable session is already done and archived — that's the track record. CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_HwoUyaWj6H8ff53iSHTr280CWUrfRuu/view?usp=sharing

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

Honestly, funding. This runs on book royalties right now which isn't sustainable for long. If I can't fund the video production and researcher time the sessions stop, the YouTube channel doesn't launch, and the methodology stays as a one-off archived paper rather than an ongoing research programme. The Constitution keeps existing but doesn't get updated from new sessions.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

Nothing yet this is the first round of applications. Parallel applications submitted to Lightcone Commons Future of Life Institute Digital Media Accelerator, Coefficient Giving Capacity-Building,