This year, we plan to give up to $100m in total to organizations and individuals in our focus areas. In future years, we expect to further increase our grantmaking volume. Below is a selection of the organizations we have supported.
Grants
The NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, directed by David Chalmers and Ned Block, is devoted to foundational issues in the mind-brain sciences. We have supported their work on AI consciousness and welfare.
The NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy is dedicated to advancing understanding of the consciousness, sentience, sapience, and moral, legal, and political status of nonhumans, including animals and AI systems.
The Center on Long-Term Risk conducts research aimed at ensuring that emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence do not risk causing suffering on an unprecedented scale.
We have supported Longview Philanthropy’s Consortium for Digital Sentience Research and Applied Work.
We helped seed the Cooperative AI Foundation through a $15,000,000 commitment. Their mission is to support research that will improve the cooperative intelligence of advanced AI for the benefit of all.
Eleos AI conducts research on the potential sentience and wellbeing of AI systems, aiming to inform policy, guide labs, and grow the field of AI moral patienthood.
We made a $3,000,000 commitment to Carnegie Mellon University to establish the Foundations of Cooperative AI Lab headed by Vincent Conitzer. The lab’s research agenda is on creating foundations of game theory appropriate for advanced, autonomous AI agents – with a focus on achieving cooperation.
We have supported Longview Philanthropy’s request for proposals for work on hardware-enabled mechanisms for AI verification.
Myrias finds the largest neglected sources of animal suffering and builds whatever vehicle fits the problem by incubating from scratch and piloting interventions directly.
Redwood Research is a nonprofit AI safety and security research organization working to better understand the risks that could arise if powerful AI systems purposefully act against the interests of their developers and human institutions broadly, and to develop methodologies that will allow us to manage those risks while still realizing the benefits of AI.
Rethink Priorities works to find tractable and neglected opportunities for impact across cause areas, including animal welfare, global health and development, global catastrophic risks, artificial intelligence, and more. They address the world’s most pressing issues to create meaningful, lasting change.
Impact Investments
in addition to grants, we also make selective impact investments in socially beneficial companies.
As part of their Series A and Series B, we invested in Anthropic, an AI safety and research company. They are working on making large machine learning models more reliable, interpretable, and steerable.
Apollo Research is dedicated to improving our understanding of AI to mitigate risks from dangerous capabilities in advanced AI systems.
Gray Swan develops tools that automatically assess the risks of AI models, plus its own AI safeguards that provide best-in-class safety and security.
Halcyon Ventures creates and invests in companies that make AI safe, secure and beneficial for humanity.
Seldon Lab brings together the world's most capable founders while conducting its own cutting-edge research and directly developing the existential security technologies that will define how humanity relates with general machine intelligence.