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Open Philanthropy: Progress in 2024 and Plans for 2025
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4/5
High(4)High quality. Established institution or organization with editorial oversight and accountability.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Coefficient Giving
Open Philanthropy is one of the largest funders in the AI safety space; their annual progress reports are useful for understanding funding priorities, institutional strategy, and which organizations and research directions receive major philanthropic backing.
Metadata
Importance: 52/100organizational reportnews
Summary
Open Philanthropy reviews its 2024 philanthropic activities and outlines priorities for 2025, with emphasis on AI safety research funding, strategic partnerships, and grants spanning global health and catastrophic risk reduction. The report provides transparency into one of the field's largest funders and signals where major resources will flow in the AI safety ecosystem.
Key Points
- •Open Philanthropy expanded partnerships and increased strategic grant-making across AI safety and global catastrophic risk domains in 2024.
- •The report signals continued prioritization of AI safety research as a core funding area alongside global health initiatives.
- •Plans for 2025 reflect evolving funder strategy in response to rapid AI development and emerging safety challenges.
- •The update offers rare transparency into how a major philanthropic actor allocates resources across the AI safety field-building ecosystem.
- •Field-building and training programs remain key pillars of Open Philanthropy's approach to developing AI safety talent and community.
Review
Open Philanthropy's 2024 report demonstrates a strategic evolution in philanthropic approach, emphasizing collaborative funding and targeted investments in critical global challenges. The organization significantly expanded its work in AI safety, committing approximately $50 million to technical research and developing new frameworks for understanding potential risks from advanced AI systems. The organization's methodology continues to prioritize causes that are important, neglected, and tractable, with a growing focus on building external partnerships and pooled funds. Notable achievements include launching the Lead Exposure Action Fund (LEAF), supporting AI safety research infrastructure, and developing new approaches to tracking and mitigating global catastrophic risks. Their work reflects a nuanced understanding of emerging technological challenges, particularly in AI, while maintaining a broad portfolio of global health, development, and risk mitigation initiatives.
Cited by 4 pages
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| AI Safety Intervention Effectiveness Matrix | Analysis | 73.0 |
| Dustin Moskovitz | Person | 49.0 |
| AI Safety Field Building and Community | Crux | 0.0 |
| AI Safety Intervention Portfolio | Approach | 91.0 |
3 FactBase facts citing this source
| Entity | Property | Value | As Of |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coefficient Giving | Total Funding Raised | $650M | 2024 |
| Coefficient Giving | Description | AI safety spending (2024): $63.6M | — |
| Coefficient Giving | Total Funding Raised | $2.8B | 2024 |
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Our Progress in 2024 and Plans for 2025 | Coefficient Giving
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March 6, 2025
Our Progress in 2024 and Plans for 2025
By
Alexander Berger
Editor’s note : This article was published under our former name, Open Philanthropy.
2024 marked 10 years since we launched Open Philanthropy. We spent our first decade learning (about grantmaking , cause selection , and the history of philanthropy ), and growing our team and expertise to be able to effectively deploy billions of dollars from Good Ventures , our main funder. Our early grants — and some grantees we’ve helped get started — are now old enough that we can see material signs of our impact in the world.
The start of our second decade also marked a major change in our direction. With Good Ventures approaching the level of spending consistent with its founders’ ambition to spend down in their lifetimes, we finally began to execute at scale on our long-held ambition to support other funders, and found a surprising degree of early success . I expect that our ambition to serve additional partners will guide much of our second decade.
A few highlights from the year:
We launched the Lead Exposure Action Fund (LEAF) , a >$100 million collaborative fund to reduce lead exposure globally. LEAF marked our first major foray into partnering with other funders beyond Good Ventures, and we’re planning to do a lot more in this vein going forward — more below .
Our longtime grantee David Baker won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his groundbreaking work using AI for protein design. We’re proud to have supported both the basic methods development and the potentially high-impact humanitarian applications of his work for ailments like syphilis , hepatitis C , snakebite , and malaria .
Our grantee Open New York played an important role in the recent passage of New York City’s largest zoning overhaul in over 60 years . The city planning department expects the package to create 80,000 new homes over 15 years, making this the first set of major YIMBY reforms to pass in New York City.
Research mentorship programs that we fund continue to produce some of the top technical talent in AI safety and security . Graduates of programs like MATS , the Astra Fellowship , LASR Labs , and ERA-AI have contributed to key safety areas like interpretability, evaluations, and loss of control. For instance, MATS now trains more than 100 aspiring AI safety researchers annually, some of whom rapidly contribute to the field: a recent graduate received “ Best Paper ” at one of the leading AI conferences.
Our grantee, the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund, brought attention to the unprecedented risks of creating mirror bacteria , working alongside a group of 30+ esteemed scientists (including two Nobel la
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