Talking to current and former insiders at the frontier of AI, we repeatedly came across a question: “If I see something in my work that seems worrying or wrong to me, how can I get an expert opinion on my concern – without revealing any confidential information (yet) or making a disclosure?”
We help concerned individuals working at the frontier of AI with expert-opinions on their questions.
Submit a question via our Tor-based tool to us. We then custom-select independent experts with you, handle the outreach, and orchestrate an anonymous Q&A with you. Covering a broad range of topics (scroll to “Topics we cover”).
Anonymously, securely, without sharing your confidential information.
Without pushing you towards any sort of disclosure – solely to help you judge whether what you’re seeing is cause for concern.
AIWI helps you to summarize your concern and prepare to anonymously connect with an external expert, without sharing any sensitive information. Use the secure form to submit your question, securely and anonymously.
How to submit a question?1. You notice a concern during your work that you think may indicate development or deployment of AI in ways that could stand in contrast to the public interest.
2. You formulate a question that would help you identify whether your concern is well-founded – without including any confidential information or information that could lead back to you or the organization you work for.
3. You anonymously submit that question to us via the secure form (a OSS, regularly pen-tested GlobaLeaks instance).
4. You receive credentials to log back in to view your account your. As we do not store emails, we cannot send you notifications: You will have to check back in regularly.
5. We get in touch with you via the tool to refine your question and identify relevant independent experts.
6. We approach experts to confidentially provide opinions. Experts only receive your questions if they agree to our terms & conditions around confidentiality.
7. We share the experts’ opinions on your questions to you via the anonymous tool.
8. We relay follow-up questions and responses, acting as a Q&A intermediary.
9. Once you are satisfied with the answers, the process either ends or we can either connect you with a support organization (where you can share confidential information covered under legal privilege).
Discover the best whistleblower support organizations here.
10. All conversation data gets deleted after 21 days of inactivity. We will never act on any of your questions without your explicit consent.
1. Tom works at Omega AI Labs and has witnessed that the evals that are run on their models are not published.
2. He feels like this may be inadequate for a company of his scale, but he is not sure if he is overreacting. Tom is keen not to share with the outside world that Omega AI Labs [intends to] follow this practice.
3. He downloads Brave Browser on his private machine, enters Tor, and reaches out to Third Opinion, asking “Should my lab publish their model evals?”
4. He writes down the login credentials and checks back 2 days later.
5. The Third Opinion team responds and offers to set up an anonymous, secure call with Tom.
In the call, Tom and the Third Opinion team refine the question to make sure that experts can provide a more nuanced answer along ‘thresholds’: “What are the critical decision dimensions based on which labs should determine whether to publish their capability evals? Under which circumstances should they (not) publish their evals? What public precedent from leading labs exists for publishing of evals?”
From his research, Tom knows about two independent researchers working on this topic whose opinion he’d like to hear. In addition, Third Opinion knows about another researcher with expertise in the topic.
6. Third Opinion takes the question and gathers answers from the researchers over the coming 3 weeks. The team shares these answers with Tom via the secure communication channel.
7. After agreeing to Third Opinion’s T&C, the experts receive the question and, a few days later, share their answers with us. We then share these answer with Tom via the GlobaLeaks tool.
8. The Third Opinion team coordinates the Q&A process with the experts.
9. Tom can reflect on the answers and, knowing the circumstances of his situation, apply the guidance to convince his team to make appropriate changes to their policy.
10. His question gets deleted from our GlobaLeaks instance after 21 days.
AIWI helps you to summarize your concern and prepare to anonymously connect with an external expert, without sharing any sensitive information. Use the secure form to submit your question, securely and anonymously.
Submit a question (open with a Tor-Browser)This is especially the case in technical domains, where you likely know best which independent experts are most suited to answering your question. If you don’t feel comfortable approaching them directly – that is where we can help.
Before you submit your question, however please apply the following checklist to your question. You should be answering ‘yes’ to all below:
A concern could be as ‘small’ as “red teaming concerns are not being followed up on” to as ‘large’ as “we are making massive progress in automating ML research without any consideration for informing the public or implementing oversight mechanisms internally”.
More detailed examples:
A. Model Behavior & Control
B. Deployment & Monitoring
C. Security & Access
A. Public Communication
B. Internal Governance
C. Employee Treatment
A. Research Ethics
B. Development Practices
A. Societal Impact
B. Industry Relations
A. Regulatory Compliance
B. Financial Practices
A. Safety Culture
B. Ethical Culture
A. Lobbying Activities
B. Policy Manipulation
C. Political Relationships
D. Public Policy Engagement
E. International Influence
F. Democratic Process Impact
*With the Tor Browser or the Brave Private Window with Tor it becomes trivial to access any onionsite.
In the past, if you had a concern, you’d have to reach out to your close network, an expert directly, or a journalist, risking leaking confidential information. That’s why we created Third Opinion:
Individuals at the frontier who reach out to us directly:
Organisations working with individuals that require peer review:
Here: Submit a Question. Open this link using Tor browser.
You receive a code to log back in again. Please do so every 1-2 days, as we do not store any information that would allow us to send you notifications for security/privacy reasons.
We will then reach out to you to schedule a call via an anonymous calling software. Do not switch on your camera during the call and do not provide your real name.
In this call, we will discuss and refine your question, which (type of) experts may be best suited to your question, as well as your preferences on knowing the experts’ identities. Per default, the experts’ identities will not be shared with you.
We will then reach out to relevant experts and gather answers. This can take multiple weeks, although we can do our best to accelerate the process if time requires it.
We will share the answers through the tool. Please log back in every 3-5 days to check for answers.
You can then share follow-up questions with us, we forward them, the process continues.
That’s it. See for an example.
Yes, absolutely. Just log back in, message us accordingly, and we will stop all proceedings. You will not have to provide any reason.
No – the opposite. We are here to help you find answers to your questions without sharing any confidential information so that you can decide for yourself if the situation that you find yourself in has crossed any concern/risk thresholds.
No. We only need you to confirm that you are honestly looking for help and which type of organization you work so we can ensure independence of experts.
No. We will evaluate them first, do our best to ensure it cannot be traced back to any specific organization/ individual, and potentially refine them with you before sharing them with selected experts.
Never. Confidentiality is the core of our offering and we will never do anything to compromise this confidentiality.
We use a self-hosted instance of the most up to date version of GlobaLeaks – an open source solution used by news-rooms and non-profits globally for handling information confidentially and anonymously. GlobaLeaks is regularly pen-tested and audited.
Our self-hosted instance is hosted in Germany, our disks are fully encrypted, and GlobaLeaks encrypts the data stored in the database.
Given the sensitive nature of your and our work, it is better to be safe than sorry. With the Tor Browser or the Brave Private Window with Tor it becomes trivial to access any onion site.
We employ strict security measures on operational and systems level, this translates to
Internal operations
We do our best to, but 100% security is never possible. Whilst we do our best to assure your anonymity and safety, it is important to understand that a large amount of vectors is on the client side. We can only secure our side of the equation, be mindful and follow best practices of security at all times. See the question above for details on the measures we take.
Individuals who are not employed or in any meaningful way involved at an organization related to your organisation. This could mean an independent researcher, a researcher at a research institute, in academia, a think tank employee, lawyer, etc.. You will always have control over who your question is shared with (see question “Will I know who the experts are”).
We likely don’t. We recruit them for your question. You can point us to independent experts that you think are most fit to answer your question.
No, we don’t publish a list to protect the privacy of our experts. Once you have a question you’d like support on, we will discuss options with you.
The identity of the expert can be shared with you if the expert agrees and you want to know their identity. You can also decide that you don’t want to have your question shared with any experts you do not know the identity of.
Because they are like you and me: They care about responsible development of AI. They also want to make sure that their research matters, reaches those that need it, and that they’re considering the most relevant considerations in their own research.
We employ a two-pronged process: We first ensure together that the phrasing of the question does not contain any confidential information or information that would identify you or your organisation.
In addition, our terms and conditions ensure that they won’t share your question, the Q&A, or the fact that they received it via Third Opinion with any Third Party. Our experts have to accept these T&C before accepting your question.
What they are allowed to do is have your question inform their research and their publications. Any other commitment would also not be feasible, as they will have very likely been working on your or a tangential question before our outreach – otherwise they would not be experts.
No. We will do our best but cannot guarantee it.
You are free to point us towards specific experts that would be well suited to answer your question.
No. We do our best to bring you the most qualified opinions, but our experts are human.
Yes. They are however not allowed to disclose that their inspiration was a conversation held via Third Opinion.
No. We are a non-profit and are offering this service because we care about supporting individuals that want to make this world a better place.
Third Opinion is one of multiple projects under the umbrella of the AIWI (formerly OAISIS) brand. AIWI is a project currently hosted under Whistleblower Netzwerk e.V., Germany’s largest and oldest non-profit organization aimed at supporting anyone who wants to speak up about misconduct in industry or government. Note that this does not mean Third Opinion provides Whistleblowing Support services. We are only here to help you understand whether what you are seeing is cause for concern.
No. We support organisations and individuals working in those organisations that lead the way in developing AI in the public benefit. We support those organizations and individuals who act honestly, responsibly, and transparently. We acknowledge that current incentive systems are set up in a way that only exceptionally thoughtful, strategic, and capable leaders can resist the short-term benefits offered by ‘skipping’ on safety and fostering cultures focused on in-group loyalty. In addition, we share an interest with labs in preventing ‘boy who cried wolf’/’false positive’ situations, in which concerned individuals might leak reports with the public that turn out to not in fact be relevant issues.
No. Please take a look at our Terms of Service: Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen (AGB) for details and additional information.
Reach out to us via our contact section.
You are in control of whether your identity is revealed to the Assistance Seeker. We will not publish your identity or your involvement with Third Opinion without your consent.
Generally Yes, as long as there is no risk of this allowing a third party to identify that you had a conversation with someone via Third Opinion or that a conversation with someone from an external organization inspired your research: See our Terms of Service: Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen (AGB).
You should never advise Assistance Seekers to break any contractual obligations.
