PauseAI Czechia

PauseAI Czechia (PauseAI CZ) is the Czech national chapter of PauseAI, the international AI-safety movement calling for a coordinated, treaty-backed pause on the training of the most powerful general-purpose AI systems. The chapter is anchored across Prague and Brno, is the corpus's first Czech and first Central- / Eastern-European local group of any kind, and sits alongside the corpus's in-corpus PauseAI Bay Area, PauseAI NYC, PauseAI Canada, PauseAI London, Pause IA (PauseAI France), PauseAI Germany, PauseAI Utrecht / Netherlands, PauseAI Australia, PauseAI Kenya, and PauseAI Nigeria chapters in the federation cluster.

Leadership and structure

PauseAI Czechia is named on PauseAI Global's About page under a single national-leader listing for Matěj Jaroš, alongside the federation's other national-chapter leads in the US (Holly Elmore), UK (Joseph Miller), France (Clémence Peyrot following Maxime Fournes's elevation to PauseAI Global CEO in late 2025), Germany (Benjamin Schmidt), Spain (Ayoze García González), Italy (Giulia Consonni), Sweden (Carl), Romania (Raluca Spataru), Nigeria (Khadija Sabiu, leading PauseAI Nigeria), Kenya (Seth Momanyi Ouko, leading PauseAI Kenya), Serbia (Svetozar Jankovic), Canada (Jeremy Eliosoff), and Australia (Michael Huang and Peter Horniak). The chapter's own Kdo jsme (Who We Are) page carries Jaroš's title as Předseda (Chairman) and the chapter's social-media administrator, names Dalibor Krejčí as Vice-chairman and media contact, identifies Ondřej Lukeš (website and social-media manager) and Jiří Košárek as the chapter's co-founders, and lists Ondřej Kubů (mathematician and newsletter editor) and Dominika Olivová (filmmaker, media team) among the chapter's core members. The chapter publishes an additional panel of external experts collaborating on its public-facing work — Charles University sociologist Martin Nekola, education-and-technology specialist Bohumil Kartous, data-scientist and economist Martin Vraný, macroeconomics expert Zdeněk Rosenberg, Pardubice University philosophy department head Ondřej Krása, and Human-aligned AI Summer School co-organiser Martin Vlach — a documented expert-panel layer that the corpus's other in-corpus PauseAI chapters do not publicly carry on their own chapter pages at draft time. The chapter is volunteer-led, consistent with the federation's general pattern outside the three paid-staff chapters — PauseAI US, PauseAI UK, and Pause IA — recorded inside org-pauseai.

Public-output footprint

PauseAI Czechia's documented public-output register at draft time runs across four distinct threads — a Czech-language chapter website, an executed February 2025 Prague protest, a recurring Prague-and-Brno meetup and expert-engagement programme, and the chapter's signature student-facing Ideathon programme. The chapter is the corpus's first PauseAI chapter whose dominant public-source register pairs executed-protest participation with a publicly-listed expert advisory panel and a Czech-language programme spanning two cities.

• Czech-language chapter website with petition and email-builder tools. PauseAI CZ's homepage publishes in Czech (with linked English resources) and frames the chapter's mission as "vytvoření globální dohody, která pozastaví vývoj umělé obecné inteligence (AGI), dokud nebude možné zajistit její bezpečnost" (creating a global agreement to pause AGI development until safety can be ensured). The chapter routes supporters into petition signing and an email-builder advocacy tool for contacting public officials, alongside articles, resources, and an explicit "P(doom)" page. The homepage names past collaborators including Efektivní Altruismus (Effective Altruism Czech Republic), SCIO, Smíchovská střední průmyslová škola a gymnázium, Students for Impact, České Priority, and KISK, placing the chapter inside the broader Czech effective-altruism and AI-policy adjacent ecosystem.
• February 2025 Prague protest at Wenceslas Square — Paris AI Action Summit cycle. PauseAI Global's writeup of the 7-11 February 2025 international protest wave around the Paris AI Action Summit co-chaired by Emmanuel Macron and Narendra Modi names Prague among the eighteen participating cities — Paris, New York, Victoria, London, Berlin, Brussels, Zürich, Prague, Milan, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, Kristiansand, Trondheim, Kinshasa, Brazzaville, N'Djaména, and Melbourne. The Prague action is anchored on a dedicated Luma event page titled "PauseAI protest Pařížský summit — Praha" (PauseAI protest Paris Summit — Prague), held at Václavské náměstí (Wenceslas Square) — the Czech capital's principal civic protest square — and naming Matěj Jaroš as the protest's organiser. This locates PauseAI Czechia's contribution to the federation's international protest cycle on the executed-protest register rather than on the planning / fundraising / launch-phase registers that anchor the corpus's other Global-South PauseAI chapters.
• Recurring Prague-and-Brno meetup and expert-engagement programme. PauseAI CZ's events page lists the chapter's continuing programme of in-person convenings across Prague and Brno — a May 2026 AI Circle Meeting at VEGALITE in Brno co-organised with the Effective Altruism Society, a May 2026 Prague meetup at the Municipal Library of Prague on Mariánské náměstí, a May 2026 expert meeting at Na Boršově in Prague 1, and a June 2026 panel discussion. The dual-city Prague-and-Brno cadence is the corpus's first PauseAI chapter to publicly programme recurring meetups in two named cities of a single national territory at this draft time, distinct from the corpus's other federation chapters' single-city or city-cluster anchors.
• Ideathon AI — signature student-facing programme. PauseAI Czechia operates a dedicated student-facing programme under the Ideathon AI banner, hosted on the chapter's own ideathon.pauseai.cz subdomain and run across Praha (Prague) and Brno. The April 2026 Ideathon AI events page on the chapter site describes the programme as addressing the ethical and societal challenges posed by artificial intelligence, run with mentorship and seventeen workshop topics. The dedicated subdomain plus the dual-city programme position student-and-school engagement as a named chapter methodology, distinct from the corpus's other in-corpus PauseAI chapters whose stated outreach methodologies anchor primarily on protests, meetups, or grant-funded national hubs rather than on competitive student-ideation formats.

Place in the movement

PauseAI Czechia is the corpus's first Czech and first Central- / Eastern-European local group of any kind. The chapter's distinctive contribution to the corpus's PauseAI shape is fourfold. First, the chapter's Central- / Eastern-European anchor closes the federation cluster's previously Western-and-Northern-European European footprint inside the corpus — extending the corpus's AI-safety register past the PauseAI Bay Area, NYC, Canada, London, Paris, Germany, Utrecht / Netherlands, Australia, Kenya, and Nigeria national-chapter geography and giving the corpus its first AI-safety / pause-movement anchor in the post-socialist Central-European space. Second, the chapter's executed February 2025 protest at Wenceslas Square locates Czechia's federation-cycle contribution on the executed-protest register rather than on the planning / fundraising / launch-phase registers that anchor the corpus's other recent Global-South PauseAI additions (PauseAI Kenya on grant-fundraising; PauseAI Nigeria on launch phase) — giving the corpus its first PauseAI chapter outside the Anglophone Global North whose dominant federation-cycle register is executed-action rather than developmental. Third, the chapter's publicly-listed expert advisory panel of six named external academic and civil-society experts — including a Charles University sociologist, a Pardubice University philosophy department head, and the Human-aligned AI Summer School co-organiser — gives the corpus its first PauseAI chapter whose own chapter site documents a standing expert-engagement layer alongside the volunteer leadership team, structurally distinct from the corpus's other PauseAI chapters whose chapter pages anchor on the volunteer leadership team alone. Fourth, the chapter's signature Ideathon AI programme on a dedicated ideathon.pauseai.cz subdomain, run across Prague and Brno, gives the corpus its first PauseAI chapter whose named outreach methodology centres on a recurring student-facing competitive-ideation format hosted on a chapter-controlled subdomain — adding a structurally distinct chapter-development pattern to the corpus's PauseAI cluster alongside Kenya's Swahili / Kiswahili translation programme, the Anglophone chapters' meetup-and-protest anchors, and Nigeria's federation-listed launch-phase anchor.