AI Policy Institute

Those polls about how the public thinks about AI, including several from last year around SB 1047 including an adversarial collaboration with Dean Ball?

Remarkably often, these are the people that did that. Without them, few would be asking those questions. Ensuring that someone is asking is super helpful. With some earlier polls I was a bit worried that the wording was slanted, and that will always be a concern with a motivated pollster, but I think recent polls have been much better at this, and they are as close to neutral as one can reasonably expect.

There are those who correctly point out that even now in 2025 the public’s opinions are weakly held and low salience, and that all you’re often picking up is ‘the public does not like AI and it likes regulation.’

Fair enough. Someone still has to show this, and show it applies here, and put a lie to people claiming the public goes the other way, and measure how things change over time. We need to be on top of what the public is thinking, including to guard against the places it wants to do dumb interventions.

They don’t only do polling. They also do lobbying and prepare for crisis responses.

Donate here, or use their contact form to get in touch.

AI Policy Institute (mostly) runs public opinion polls on AI risks, some of which are relevant to x-risk. The polls cover some important issues and provide useful information to motivate policy-makers. Some examples:

• 2.5x more voters support SB 1047 than oppose it. (source)
• 56% of voters agreed it would be a good thing if AI progress was significantly slowed, vs. 27% disagreed. (source)
• Voters’ top priority on AI regulation is preventing catastrophic outcomes. (source)

This sort of work seems good. I’m not sure how big an impact it has on the margin. My intuition is that polls are good, but additional polls have rapidly diminishing returns, so I wouldn’t consider AI Policy Institute a top donation candidate.

I could not find good information about its room for more funding. It did not respond to my inquiry on its funding situation.