The Nakada Foundation to Save Humanity exists to prevent the development of artificial superintelligence from ending the human story. Not through more research. Through law, policy, and the political will to govern what the laboratories are building.
The Nakada Foundation to Save Humanity is a philanthropic initiative and advocacy organisation. We are not a research laboratory. We do not build, train, or study AI systems. We are not an ethics body concerned with bias, fairness, or the misuse of existing AI, though these are important issues. We are concerned with one thing: preventing the development of systems that exceed human intelligence in ways that cannot be controlled, corrected, or stopped.
Our work is modelled not on academic institutes but on the political campaigns and social movements that have changed the world before. The campaign to ban landmines. The movement for nuclear non-proliferation. The decades-long effort to protect the ozone layer. In each case, the threat was real, the science was clear, and the change came not from more research but from organised political pressure. That is what we are building.
We accept no funding from AI laboratories, their investors, or companies whose commercial interests depend on the development of advanced AI. We do not employ researchers whose careers depend on those laboratories' goodwill. We treat independence as a precondition, not a principle.
We support narrow AI. We are for AI that diagnoses cancer, accelerates drug discovery, and expands human capability. Our concern is not with artificial intelligence as a category but with the specific and categorically different risks posed by artificial general intelligence and systems designed to exceed and replace human reasoning across all domains.
We believe the solution to this problem is political, not technical. Alignment research is necessary but insufficient. What is required is international law, verified by inspection regimes, with consequences for violation. This has worked before with nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and the ozone layer. It can work again.
The Nakada Foundation operates outside the AI industry structure entirely. Our strategy is to build the political coalition that will make safety not a preference but a law, to fund the advocacy that shifts the Overton window, and to commission the cultural work that makes this crisis undeniable to anyone who encounters it.
Nakada is a Japanese surname. Written 中田, meaning middle and field. It is a grounded, ordinary name, the kind that has belonged to farmers and teachers and merchants for generations. Naoto Nakada placed it at the front of this Foundation for the reason that movements have always attached names to causes: to make the commitment personal, public, and permanent. This is not an anonymous institution. There is a person behind it, and that person is accountable for what it does and what it fails to do.
Most philanthropic organisations choose titles that describe a method, a region, or a cause at an institutional remove. They use language that is measured, credentialled, designed not to alarm. We chose differently. The rest of the name is not measured.
"To Save Humanity" is the job description. We are not working to improve AI policy, to advance the field of AI ethics, or to promote responsible innovation. We are working to prevent an irreversible catastrophe that a significant number of the world's most credentialled scientists believe could end the human story. The researchers who built the foundations of modern AI have publicly estimated a ten to twenty percent chance that it causes human extinction within the century. That is not a statistic that calls for circumspect language.
The name was chosen because the stakes do not permit hedging. Every time someone reads it or says it, they are confronted with what is actually at stake: not a technical problem for experts, not a concern for the distant future, but the survival of humanity. The window to act is open. It will not stay open indefinitely. We chose a name that could not be misunderstood.
The Nakada Foundation to Save Humanity was established in 2025 as an act of conviction, not expertise. Every social movement in history began not with those who had the most knowledge but with those who felt the most urgency. The abolitionists were not historians of slavery. The suffragists were not constitutional lawyers. They were people who understood the moral stakes and refused to wait for consensus.
The AI safety community has spent a decade building consensus inside academia and inside the industry. That consensus now exists. Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, and hundreds of the most respected researchers in the world have concluded that the development of artificial superintelligence poses a genuine risk of human extinction. Their consensus has not produced binding law.
The reason is structural. The researchers who understand the risk work inside or alongside the laboratories building the technology. Their funding, their careers, and their professional relationships are entangled with the very institutions they are warning about. Independence is nearly impossible within that structure.
The Nakada Foundation was founded by Naoto Nakada, an entrepreneur and marketing agency founder who has lived and worked across Tokyo, Sydney, Los Angeles, London, and Singapore. A believer in the philanthropic value of narrow AI, Naoto's concern is not with technology as a category but with systems built to exceed and replace human intelligence. He brings to this cause the instincts of a movement builder: the understanding that the world changes through law, culture, and human connection, not through papers and conferences.
Aren't you anti-technology?
No. We support narrow AI: systems that perform specific tasks, that can be corrected, that do not have the capacity to exceed human intelligence or pursue open-ended goals. What we oppose is the development of artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence: systems whose goal-directedness, capabilities, and potential autonomy make them categorically different from any previous technology. The smartphone, the internet, even nuclear power can be regulated, corrected, and shut down. A misaligned superintelligence cannot.
Isn't a pause impossible? Won't other countries just race ahead?
This is the most common objection, and it is precisely the argument that was made against nuclear non-proliferation. The NPT is imperfect, but it has worked. No nation has used nuclear weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, nine countries have nuclear weapons when hundreds could. The answer to "what if others defect?" is not "therefore we should race." It is "therefore we need a treaty with verification mechanisms." The compute required to train frontier AI systems comes from a small number of identifiable chip manufacturers. Monitoring and enforcing a compute threshold is technically feasible. It requires political will, not technological breakthroughs.
Don't AI labs already have safety teams?
Yes. They also have sales teams, investor relations departments, board members who represent shareholders, and competitive pressure to ship products faster than their rivals. Safety teams inside commercial AI labs are not independent. They operate within an incentive structure that fundamentally rewards capability development over risk reduction. When OpenAI's safety team published concerns about moving too fast, the company moved faster anyway. Internal safety teams are not a substitute for external regulation. They are, at best, a complement to it.
Is the risk really existential?
The Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton, who spent his career building the foundations of modern AI and is arguably the most credentialled person alive to make this judgment, estimates a 10 to 20 percent chance that AI causes human extinction within the century. Nobel laureate Yoshua Bengio has stated publicly that the risk is real and underappreciated. The Center for AI Safety's 2023 statement, signed by over 500 AI scientists including Sam Altman, placed AI extinction risk alongside nuclear war and pandemics as a global priority. When the people who built the technology are afraid of it, that is not a drill.
What can I do?
Join the Foundation. Share our message with people who haven't heard it. Contact your elected representative and ask what their position is on AI risk and what legislation they are supporting. If you have financial resources, consider donating to the Foundation or to other organisations working on AI safety policy. If you have cultural or media influence, use it. If you work inside an AI laboratory and have concerns, consider speaking publicly. The leverage point for this issue is political will, and political will is built by people: by you, by the people you know, and by the collective voice of everyone who understands what is at stake.
Stay informed. Be heard. Help build the political force this cause requires.