Entrepreneur, marketing agency founder, and movement builder. Founded the Nakada Foundation to Save Humanity in 2025 to prevent the existential risks of artificial superintelligence through policy, law, and global coordination.
Naoto Nakada has spent his career building businesses and communication strategies across five cities on four continents: Tokyo, Sydney, Los Angeles, London, and Singapore. His professional background is in entrepreneurship and marketing, not in artificial intelligence research. That distance from the AI industry is precisely the point.
The researchers who understand AI existential risk most deeply are, by and large, employed by or financially dependent on the laboratories building the systems they are warning about. Their careers, their funding, and their professional relationships are entangled with institutions they are simultaneously trying to govern. The independence required for effective advocacy is structurally impossible from within that system.
Naoto's founding conviction is that the world does not change because the right people have the right knowledge. It changes because the right political forces are assembled. The abolitionists were not historians of slavery. The suffragists were not constitutional lawyers. The people who protected the ozone layer were not atmospheric chemists. They were people who understood the stakes and organised accordingly.
His concern with artificial intelligence is not with the technology as a category. Narrow AI (systems that diagnose cancer, accelerate drug discovery, and extend the reach of human capability) represents one of the most beneficial technological developments in history. His concern is specific: with systems built to exceed and replace human intelligence across all domains, without the governance frameworks to ensure they remain compatible with human survival and flourishing.
The Nakada Foundation was established in 2025 as an act of conviction. Not as a research laboratory, not as an ethics body, but as a political campaign, operating on the understanding that binding international law and verified governance frameworks are the only mechanisms with the scope to match the scale of the risk. The models for this exist in nuclear non-proliferation, in the Montreal Protocol, in the Chemical Weapons Convention. The will to apply them to AI is what remains to be built.
The Foundation operates entirely outside the AI industry structure. It accepts no funding from AI companies or from organisations with a financial interest in the pace of AI development. Independence is a precondition for the Foundation's work to mean anything.
The AI safety community spent a decade building consensus inside academia and the industry. That consensus now exists. Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Sam Altman, 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 or catastrophic civilisational harm. 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. Internal safety teams are not independent. They operate within an incentive structure that fundamentally rewards capability development over risk reduction.
What is needed is external pressure: from governments, from law, from culture, and from organised citizens who understand what is at stake. The political will to govern superintelligence development must be built from outside the industry that benefits from its absence.
The Nakada Foundation exists to build that will. Through direct policy advocacy in Washington, Brussels, London, and with international bodies. Through coalition-building with the foundations, governments, and cultural figures whose voices can shift the Overton window. Through commissioning art, film, and journalism that makes the stakes visceral and impossible to ignore. The model is a political campaign for the most consequential governance decision in human history.
Direct advocacy in Washington D.C., Brussels, London, and with United Nations bodies. Focused on binding frameworks (compute governance, international AI safety treaties, a Global AI Monitoring Agency), not voluntary guidelines. Read our full plan →
Engaging the world's largest philanthropic foundations, heads of government, Nobel laureates, and cultural figures to amplify the message, fund the cause, and shift what is politically possible. The leverage point for this issue is political will.
Commissioning art, film, journalism, and media that makes the danger visceral and undeniable. Safety must be made prestigious, urgent, and impossible to ignore. The climate movement's lessons about cultural normalisation apply here, with greater urgency.
For media enquiries, partnership proposals, philanthropic discussions, or to connect with the Foundation's work, use the contact page. All serious enquiries receive a response.
Contact the Foundation → Visit naotonakada.com → Visit Nakada Design →Stay informed about the Foundation's work, policy developments, and opportunities to act.