It's Friday, June 5th: This week is Humans in AI Week, The AI Collective's global run of events from June 1 to 8. Chapters in more than 200 cities and 50-plus countries are all asking the same question: what does it mean to be human in the AI era? Today we hand the issue to three of those rooms, in San Francisco, Porto, and Halifax.
FROM COLLECTIVE HQ
✍️ Beyond the Machine: A Reflection on Humans in AI Week

A year ago, we made the decision to expand globally across all corners of the world. Over the last year, we’ve scaled to over 50+ countries and have hundreds of AI Collective chapters worldwide. But what does the scale matter if you don’t ask the right questions?
At AIC, we believe that there’s one fundamental question that matters above all else: “What does it mean to be human in the AI era?” Until we have figured out the solution to that problem, everything else is useless. We’re accelerating at light-speed toward an outcome whose impact on humanity we haven’t collectively stopped to discuss.
This week was the culmination of lots of hard work from the entire team, and we’re grateful to everyone who showed up to one of the 100+ events around the world. We couldn’t have done it without you. These ARE the critical conversations we need to have, because at the end of the day - everyone will be affected in the AI race.
Every city on earth deserves a seat at this table. If yours doesn't have a chapter yet, start one.
— AJ Green President & Executive Director, The AI Collective
FROM OUR SPONSORS
✍️ Break Frontier AI: The LILT Multilingual Coding Hackathon

Think frontier models are truly universal? Test their limits at the LILT Hackathon from June 15–21. We are challenging applied AI researchers to create deterministic, machine-verifiable coding tasks that expose exactly where leading LLMs break when a task is not in English. All submissions will be programmatically evaluated in Terminal-Bench using the Terminus 2
harness against Claude Opus 4.6. Register to stress-test model boundaries, win gift cards (top 5 spots), and claim a featured spotlight across the AI Collective and LILT networks.
Register today to secure your spot, build robust evaluation tasks, and see if you can break Claude Opus 4.6 in native environments.

Each week, we highlight AIC chapters doing groundbreaking work with their members around the world. Tag us on socials to be featured!
🌉 San Francisco | Smarter Agents, and the People Still in the Room

Image from Adelina M.
San Francisco marked Humans in AI Week with what it called The SF Gathering, and the format said a lot about the chapter's priorities. It brought founders who had presented at earlier nights back into the room, put everyone around them, and handed the floor to the builders. The week's framing fit the evening: people stop being spectators and start being participants.
The night circled one question, what it means to be human in the age of intelligence, and the answer in the room looked a lot like the people in it. As one builder, Adelina M., put it afterward, "the best part of these events is always the people." For a chapter that has run demo nights and investor nights, spending this one on its own community was the point.
🇵🇹 Porto | The Uncomfortable Questions Companies Keep Postponing

Image from Tiago Aprigio
Porto's chapter gathered at Andersen's Portugal office for a session built entirely around open discussion, with people from very different backgrounds in the room. They worked through the parts of AI that rarely make it onto a product roadmap: responsibility, privacy, governance, bias, and how much human oversight is enough.
Tiago Aprigio, who helped pull the room together, framed the stakes plainly. "AI is moving fast," he wrote. "Conversations like this help us make sure humans are not left behind." The group treated the awkward questions as the whole point, the ones that get easier to ignore the more AI becomes part of everyday work. Judging by the response afterward, Porto was glad to sit with them.
🍁 Halifax | A Kitchen Party That Took the Human Question Seriously

Image from Chido Mbavarira
Halifax opened its Humans in AI Week with an East Coast Kitchen Party, hosted with the TELUS Sovereign AI Factory and L-SPARK, built around one question: what does it mean to be human in the AI era? As Chido Mbavarira recapped it, a four-person panel answered from several angles, and not one led with the fear of being replaced.
The phrase that stuck was "99% human, 1% tool," the case for starting with people before expecting a return from AI. The takeaway matched the week's theme. AI does its best work when it simplifies something and keeps a human in the loop, and the skills nobody could automate were the human ones, relationships, empathy, and judgment.
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The AI Collective is built by volunteers across 200+ chapters in 50 countries.
Thank you to the thousands of volunteers around the world who make this work possible. We truly could not do this without you.
🧑💻 About the Editors

About Noah Frank
Noah is a researcher, innovation strategist, and ex-founder thinking and writing about the future of AI and the workforce. His work and body of research explores the economics of emerging technology and organizational strategy. Outside of AIC, Noah heads research for Centaurian AI.

About Joy Dong
Joy is a news editor, writer, and entrepreneur at the intersection of AI and blockchain. Whether she is demystifying complex systems in her newsletter, TEA, or building streamlined solutions through her automation agency, Ownly, Joy’s mission is to make emerging tech accessible and actionable for everyone.

About Lindsay Gross
Lindsay is an AI engineer, researcher, and writer focused on how AI systems behave in practice and what it takes to make them safe. Her work sits at the intersection of AI safety, governance, and product design, and at AIC she writes about the questions that matter most as these systems scale.

