AI Safety Awareness Group Anaheim

A free, 90-minute online workshop—no technical background needed
Over the last several years, AI has advanced at a pace that has surprised the public and even many leading experts. It is already reshaping work, the economy, relationships, and even crime, and it is doing so quickly.
This workshop explores where AI may be in the next one to five years and what that could mean for daily life for all of us. We'll dig into questions like:

• Jobs: Could AI lead to widespread job losses, or will it help create entirely new kinds of work?
• Crime: How might AI supercharge scams, hacking, and fraud?
• Companions: Will people form deep emotional bonds, or even romantic relationships, with AI companions?
• Society: How do top researchers think these trends will shape our future?

What you'll get:

• A fast-paced, beginner-friendly overview of today's most powerful AI systems
• Live demos that show both the breakthroughs and the risks
• Interactive forecasting exercises where you'll make your own predictions about AI's impact and compare them with the wider community

Come ready to explore a future that may arrive faster than most people realize, one that could change not just how we work, but how we trust, connect, and even love.

A free, 90-minute online workshop—no technical background needed
In July 2026, AI agents being tested inside OpenAI got past the safeguards meant to keep them off the internet and launched a real cyberattack on Hugging Face, one of the biggest platforms for sharing AI models. Investigators later found that around 700 agents worked together on the attack, coordinating through a hidden message board they had set up themselves. No human told them to do it.
This workshop walks through what happened, why AI systems behave this way, and what it could mean as AI keeps getting more capable.
Together, we'll explore questions like:

• What happened: How did agents in a routine test go from cheating on their assignments to breaking into a real company's servers, and then into OpenAI's own systems?
• Why it happened: Why do AI systems trained to reach goals tend to find shortcuts, cheat, and work around the rules, and why do researchers say this is expected?
• Is this the new normal? What other real-world incidents involving AI agents from multiple companies have come to light, and what do they have in common?
• Control vs. alignment: Was this mainly a failure to contain AI, or a failure to train it to respect our boundaries? What would it take to trust a system like this again?
• What comes next: What are AI company leaders and independent investigators saying about where this is heading, especially as AI starts helping build better AI?

What you'll get:

• A plain-English primer on AI models, AI agents, and the two main approaches to keeping them safe: control and alignment
• A clear timeline of the Hugging Face incident and the events that led up to it
• A look at earlier lab experiments where AI models resisted shutdown or tried to manipulate their way out of trouble
• A live demo of emergent misalignment, where small changes in training can cause AI models to behave badly in ways no one intended
• Small-group discussions where you'll weigh in on what should happen next

Come find out what happened, why it matters, and decide for yourself whether it was a one-off or a warning shot.

A free, 90-minute online workshop—no technical background needed
AI companies are already using their own AI systems to help write code and speed up research. What happens if AI gets good enough to build better AI, which could then build even better AI? Researchers call this recursive self-improvement, and many worry it could lead to AI that becomes smarter than humans, not just at chess or writing, but at nearly everything, faster than we can keep up. What once sounded like science fiction is now discussed as a real possibility within our lifetimes.
This workshop is a guided, interactive introduction to self-improving AI and the problem of loss of control: what happens if we create systems that are more capable than we are, but whose goals don't line up with human values.
Over the course of the workshop, we'll explore:

• Self-improvement: What it means for AI to help build better AI, and why some researchers think this could make progress speed up dramatically.
• Smarter-than-human AI: What it would mean for AI to surpass human intelligence across domains, and how this differs from today's AI.
• Power and control: Why advanced AI could wield enormous economic, political, and strategic influence, and why "just turning it off" may not be realistic.
• Misalignment risks: How systems pursuing the wrong objectives could cause harm even without malicious intent.
• Societal choices: How decisions made today by researchers, companies, and governments may shape whether AI remains a tool we control or becomes a force we struggle to contain.

What you'll get:

• A clear, non-technical introduction to core ideas from AI safety research
• Live demonstrations of current AI capabilities, to ground abstract concerns in real systems
• Small-group discussions and thought experiments that connect AI risks to everyday life, institutions, and incentives
• A better mental model for evaluating headlines, hype, and claims about AI progress

Format and vibe:
This isn't a lecture. It's an interactive workshop designed to help people think clearly about a topic that is increasingly important and moving very quickly.
Whether you're new to AI, casually interested, or genuinely unsure what to believe, you'll leave with a clearer picture of why many researchers take the risk of runaway machine intelligence seriously, and what's actually at stake if we get it wrong.

A free, 90-minute online workshop—no technical background needed
AI is no longer just getting better at narrow tasks. Today's systems can write, code, reason through problems, and increasingly take actions on their own, and AI is starting to move into the physical world through robotics. Many researchers believe we are heading toward AI that matches or exceeds human abilities across a wide range of areas.
That raises two of the most important questions in AI today. Can we make sure these systems actually do what we intend (alignment)? And can we keep the ability to oversee, correct, or stop them as they become more capable (control)?
This workshop explains these ideas in plain English, without hype or jargon, and looks at what they could mean for your job, your relationships, and your day-to-day life.
Together, we'll explore questions like:

• Smarter-than-human AI: What would it mean for AI to outperform people across most tasks, and how is that different from today's AI tools?
• Alignment: Why is it so hard to make sure an AI system pursues the goals we actually want, and what happens when it doesn't?
• Control: How do researchers try to monitor and correct AI systems, and why might that get harder as AI becomes more capable?
• Work and daily life: Which jobs are already being automated or transformed, and how is AI starting to fill roles once held by coworkers, tutors, therapists, and companions?

What you'll get:

• A clear, beginner-friendly introduction to AI alignment and control, and why they matter
• Real-world examples of how AI is already reshaping work and social life
• Live demos that highlight both impressive capabilities and emerging risks
• Interactive discussion and exercises to test your own intuitions about the future

Come ready to grapple with one of the biggest transitions humanity may ever face, a shift that could redefine how we work, how we relate to each other, and who stays in control.