PauseAI Serbia

PauseAI Serbia (Serbian: PauseAI Srbija, pauseai.rs) is the Serbian national chapter of PauseAI, the international movement calling for a coordinated, treaty-backed pause on the training of the most powerful general-purpose AI systems. Based in Belgrade and operating under the umbrella of DC LINK, a Serbian NGO, PauseAI Serbia is an autonomous part of the global PauseAI network. The chapter is the corpus's first entry in the Balkans and is among the minority of PauseAI national chapters to maintain a dedicated national website with original content in their own language rather than a social-media-only contact presence.

Founding and structure

PauseAI Serbia operates as a project under the Serbian NGO DC LINK on a nonprofit, non-commercial basis. No founding date is stated on the website; the earliest published blog post is dated November 17, 2025, establishing the outer bound on the chapter's public launch. The chapter is run by a volunteer team and describes itself as "a group of volunteers gathered around the idea of protecting society from uncontrolled risks of artificial intelligence."

The chapter's national director is Svetozar Janković, who holds a doctorate in Technical Sciences (Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Belgrade, 2005) and serves as Docent — Associate Professor of Applied Studies — at the School of Computing (RAF — Računarski Fakultet) in Belgrade, elected to that rank in 2023. He previously headed the School of Computers at the Vinča Nuclear Institute, one of Serbia's leading scientific research institutions, from 2006 to 2019. Janković is named as Serbia's national director on PauseAI Global's About page alongside 14 other national-chapter leads.

Platform — four demands for Serbia

PauseAI Serbia articulates four demands framed specifically for the Serbian context:

1. Pause on most-powerful AI systems — a moratorium on training the most capable general-purpose AI until safety is assured, aligned with PauseAI's global treaty proposal.
2. Serbian AI laws and oversight institutions — clear domestic legislation and regulatory capacity to govern AI deployment.
3. AI content labeling and creator accountability — mandatory labeling of AI-generated content and legal accountability for those who deploy it.
4. Serbia's representation in global AI negotiations — ensuring Serbia has a voice in international governance processes shaping the development of advanced AI.

The third and fourth demands reflect conditions specific to a smaller, non-EU country: the labeling demand responds to domestic concerns about AI-generated disinformation — a theme of the chapter's January 2026 blog post — while the representation demand reflects Serbia's position outside the EU and US forums where AI governance is primarily being set.

Blog and Serbian-language content

PauseAI Serbia's primary public-output channel is its Serbian-language blog at pauseai.rs. Three posts were published between November 2025 and March 2026:

• November 17, 2025 — a report on a German court ruling on AI regulation, establishing the blog as a Serbian-language venue for tracking European AI governance developments.
• January 26, 2026 — "Kada botovi odlučuju ko sme da govori" (When Bots Decide Who Gets to Speak) — an analysis of coordinated bot attacks on independent Serbian media and the risks of automated moderation systems being weaponized against independent journalism.
• March 7, 2026 — "Srce veštačke inteligencije ne sme kucati u mraku" (The Heart of AI Must Not Beat in the Dark) — an advocacy piece calling for public oversight of a Serbian-language LLM reportedly under development for Expo 2027, raising concerns about political deadline pressure, data bias, and social-engineering risk at national scale.

The March 2026 post engages directly with Serbia's domestic AI-development context — a case of a PauseAI national chapter producing targeted policy commentary on a nationally specific AI system — and marks a step beyond the formation-phase profile visible in some other smaller chapters in the federation.

Place in the movement

PauseAI Serbia is the corpus's first entry in the Balkans and the first from Serbia. Within the Eastern European cluster of PauseAI chapters in the corpus, it sits alongside PauseAI Czechia (active protest programme, Ideathon student-engagement programme, dedicated Czech-language website), PauseAI Polska (launch-phase, Polish-language website), and PauseAI Romania (formation-phase, Facebook-anchored). PauseAI Serbia occupies a tier closer to Czechia than to Romania: it maintains a dedicated national website with original Serbian-language content, a clear organisational identity under DC LINK, four stated Serbia-specific demands, and published policy commentary on a domestic AI project. The chapter's leadership profile — an academic at a computing faculty with a background in state research institutions — is distinctive within the PauseAI federation, where most chapter leads come from EA-adjacent or civil-society backgrounds.

No PauseAI Serbia-specific protest events appear in PauseAI Global's documented protest history at draft time. The chapter's primary public-output channel is its Serbian-language blog rather than protest action or events, suggesting an advocacy-and-commentary orientation at this stage.