Rethink Priorities: 2025 Results, 2026 Plans and Funding Needs

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2025·EA Forum·forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CjPexDkSHoRpknNGv/rethi...

Authors

Rethink Priorities·Marcus_A_Davis·kierangreig🔸·Janique·rickardvikstrom

Credibility Rating

3/5

Good(3)

Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.

Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum

Rethink Priorities is a research organization producing empirical studies relevant to EA cause prioritization and AI safety; this annual update is useful for understanding their research direction and funding landscape.

Metadata

Importance: 38/100news

Summary

Rethink Priorities presents their 2025 research accomplishments, outlines strategic priorities for 2026, and makes the case for continued funding. The post covers their work across AI safety, global health, animal welfare, and longtermist cause areas, detailing research impact and organizational capacity.

Key Points

•Rethink Priorities summarizes key research outputs and impact metrics from 2025 across multiple cause areas including AI safety and animal welfare.
•The organization outlines its 2026 research agenda, including planned expansions in AI safety and policy-relevant empirical research.
•A funding gap is identified, with specific asks directed at EA-aligned donors and major funders to sustain and grow operations.
•The post reflects Rethink Priorities' model of producing decision-relevant, empirical research for the effective altruism and AI safety communities.
•Strategic priorities include deepening AI safety research capacity alongside continued work on moral weights and welfare range estimation.

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# Rethink Priorities: 2025 Results, 2026 Plans and Funding Needs
By Rethink Priorities, Marcus_A_Davis, kierangreig🔸, Janique, rickardvikstrom
Published: 2025-11-18
TLDR: 

*   Rethink Priorities has room for more funding. With **a core budget for 2026 of $7.5 million**, we believe that we can productively use at leas**t $9.3 million to scale high-leverage opportunities** in our areas of global health and development, animal welfare, worldview investigations (including AI and digital minds), and surveys.
*   **Unrestricted funding** is most valuable, as it enables the entire organization to run more efficiently, and allows us to act quickly on neglected or time-sensitive opportunities.
*   We are **advancing multiple new initiatives** within the RP ecosystem:
    *   AI Strategy
    *   AI Cognition Initiative
    *   Interdisciplinary Research Hub
    *   GHD Research Subsidy Fund for EA ecosystem support
    *   Neglected Animals Project Fund and Neglected Animals Talent Program
*   Open Philanthropy will **match all unrestricted donations to our GHD work **(up to $400K).
*   Learn more about results and plans for each RP department.

Read a visualized summary of this post [here](https://bit.ly/4i6SWOD).  
Read this whole post as a visualized PDF [here](https://bit.ly/3WZJYt5).   
  
When Peter Wildeford and I, Marcus A. Davis, founded Rethink Priorities (RP) in 2018, we saw a gap in the charity landscape: too few organizations were providing the rigorous comparative analysis needed to allocate resources optimally. Seven years later, thanks to the trust and support of this community, RP has become one of the few research organizations pioneering work in areas that didn't exist as distinct fields when we began.

Since our early days, RP has grown into a think-and-do tank that combines careful analysis with practical action to make progress on global priorities. We think our comparative advantage lies in working upstream, and so aim to contribute where rigorous thinking and early, well-informed decisions can make a meaningful difference. 

We've adopted a cross-cause perspective because we believe understanding trade-offs and connections between areas like animal welfare, global health, and longtermist priorities is important for long-term impact. By helping funders assess opportunities across causes using transparent, evidence-based frameworks, we hope to support better resource allocation. And when we identify emerging areas like digital consciousness or invertebrate welfare before they're crowded, we can influence trajectories while fields are still being shaped.

<table style="border-style:none"><tbody><tr><td style="border-color:#000000;padding:5pt;vertical-align:top"><p><br><strong>Thanks to this approach, we delivered the following 2025 outcomes for funders and partners:</strong></p><ul><li><strong>Directly advised major philanthropic funders</strong><ul><li>Our research in global health and development supported some of the biggest phila

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Resource ID: 6bb3f99efcf6f2fd