Rethink Priorities

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Overview

Rethink Priorities is a San Francisco-based think-and-do tank that conducts research and implements solutions to improve the lives of humans and animals through evidence-based interventions. Founded in January 2018 by Peter Hurford and Marcus A. Davis, the organization positions itself at the intersection of research rigor and practical action, rigorously evaluating evidence while testing high-leverage interventions across multiple cause areas¹.

The organization operates with a distinctive dual identity as both a research producer and consulting firm, providing tailored services to nonprofits, foundations, policymakers, and researchers. According to Rethink Priorities, their mission is to support organizations and changemakers in generating significant charitable impact through strategic consulting, philanthropic alignment, and evidence-based decision-making tools². By 2023, the organization had grown from its initial two-person team to approximately 70 core staff, 30 contractors, and 25 staff in fiscally sponsored projects, representing substantial scaling in just five years³.

Rethink Priorities emphasizes several foundational principles that distinguish its approach: reasoning transparency (making explicit how sources contribute to conclusions), intellectual honesty and humility (acknowledging knowledge limits), and a commitment to both present and future welfare considerations. The organization has earned a 4/4 star rating from Charity Navigator, reflecting strong performance in accountability and financial management⁴.

History

Founding and Early Growth (2018-2019)

Rethink Priorities began in January 2018 as an independent project of Rethink Charity, initially focused on uncovering actionable insights for the effective altruism movement to better allocate time and money toward doing good⁵. The co-founders—Peter Hurford and Marcus A. Davis—brought complementary backgrounds to the venture. Marcus A. Davis had previously co-founded Charity Science Health, where he analyzed global poverty interventions and led cost-effectiveness analyses, while also running Effective Altruism Chicago and working with Rethink Charity on global EA group outreach⁶.

The organization's founding premise was to apply the evidence-based approaches that had proven successful in global health research (such as GiveWell's analysis methodology) to more neglected areas like animal welfare and AI risks. The organization focused on important and neglected cause areas, including animal welfare, global health and development, AI governance and strategy, and existential security⁷.

During 2018, Rethink Priorities conducted capacity building activities including vaccine cost-effectiveness analyses, launching PriorityWiki (which would later be acknowledged as a significant failure), and hiring seven researchers. The organization's 2019 budget totaled $447,000, with $294,000 sought through additional fundraising. A key goal for 2019 was to influence at least four granters or donors who would cite Rethink Priorities research for decisions involving at least $50,000, particularly in animal advocacy⁸.

Expansion Phase (2020-2022)

Between 2020 and 2022, Rethink Priorities experienced rapid scaling. The organization tripled in size, growing to approximately 130 people when counting employees, fiscally sponsored projects, and contractors⁹. This expansion reflected both increased funding availability and growing demand for the organization's research across multiple cause areas.

In July 2020, Rethink Priorities transitioned from being a project of Rethink Charity to becoming its own legal US 501(c)(3) entity with an independent board of directors¹⁰. This structural change provided greater organizational autonomy and capacity for growth.

During this period, the organization expanded its research portfolio significantly. It launched a longtermism team focused on AI governance, nuclear risks, and forecasting; deepened its animal welfare work to include invertebrate welfare research; and incubated what became the first effective altruism groups specifically focused on invertebrate interventions. By early 2023, the organization reflected on five years of growth from 1.5 full-time equivalent staff to nearly 50 FTE¹¹.

Recent Developments (2023-2026)

In 2023, Rethink Priorities produced approximately 160 research pieces and outputs. The organization's research reportedly informed more than $10 million in grants by other organizations—matching Rethink Priorities' own operating budget. Additionally, the organization supported 11 external projects with $5.1 million through its Special Projects program¹².

The organization made several strategic shifts during this period. It emphasized strengthening relationships with stakeholders, diversifying funding sources to scale impact, and investing in implementation beyond research dissemination. Early traction in AI governance and foundational work on shrimp welfare represented new priority areas¹³.

A significant leadership change occurred when Marcus A. Davis became sole CEO, transitioning from the previous co-CEO structure with Peter Wildeford¹⁴. This change reflected organizational maturation and a shift in leadership structure.

By late 2025, Rethink Priorities reported progress in advising major philanthropic funders with program budgets totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. The organization also launched new initiatives including an AI Strategy team focused on actionable research to reduce global catastrophic risk, an AI Cognition Initiative examining digital minds research, and three new ecosystem initiatives¹⁵. For 2026, the organization identified a core budget need of $7.5 million with capacity to effectively use at least $9.3 million in unrestricted funding for scaling opportunities¹⁶.

Research Focus and Methodology

Core Research Areas

Rethink Priorities organizes its work around four primary domains:

Animal Welfare: The organization conducts foundational research on topics that mainstream animal advocacy often overlooks. This includes pioneering work on shrimp welfare, invertebrate sentience and welfare capacities, and farmed animal welfare across the EU. The Animal Welfare department completed 21 research projects in 2024 alone, covering animal product consumption, crustaceans, fish, insects, and wild animals. The organization also launched the Moral Weight Project in May 2021, which aimed to provide a framework for comparing welfare across species to inform resource allocation decisions¹⁷.

Global Health and Development: The Global Health and Development team comprises approximately 10 multidisciplinary researchers with expertise in economics, epidemiology, health, science, and policy. As of the research period, this team had completed 23 commissioned reports for five different organizations and two self-driven reports, with four published publicly. The team provides consulting services to organizations like Coefficient GivingOrganizationCoefficient GivingCoefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) has directed \$4B+ in grants since 2014, including \$336M to AI safety (~60% of external funding). The organization spent ~\$50M on AI safety in 2024...Quality: 55/100 and GiveWell on top opportunities, reviews of discount rates, road safety policy advocacy, and health metrics like QALYs and DALYs¹⁸.

Global Catastrophic Risks and AI Governance: Rethink Priorities began focused work on AI governance and strategy in early 2022, building a dedicated team to address what the organization describes as "the complicated problem of ensuring future challenges with AI go well." This work includes research on risk alignment in agentic AICapabilityAgentic AIAnalysis of agentic AI capabilities and deployment challenges, documenting industry forecasts (40% of enterprise apps by 2026, \$199B market by 2034) alongside implementation difficulties (40%+ pro...Quality: 68/100 systems, AI safety bounties, and prospects for international AI safety agreements. The organization also researches global catastrophic risks¹⁹.

Surveys and Data Analysis: This research stream provides tools and empirical data to support decision-making across causes. Notable outputs include the EA Surveys examining cause prioritization within the effective altruism movement, the Portfolio Builder tool for cross-cause allocation decisions under uncertainty, and the Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model. The organization also analyzes forecasting accuracy across different time horizons and levels of forecaster experience²⁰.

Research Principles and Process

Rethink Priorities emphasizes several methodological commitments that distinguish its approach. The organization prioritizes "reasoning transparency," which involves making reasoning explicit, specifying how sources contribute to conclusions, stating certainty levels around claims, and identifying major sources of uncertainty. This is paired with "intellectual honesty and humility," acknowledging the limits of current knowledge and maintaining openness to diverse perspectives²¹.

According to the organization's description of its research process, projects typically involve 2-3 researchers with a senior project lead, drawing from multidisciplinary teams spanning academia, consulting, medicine, and nonprofit backgrounds. The methodology incorporates techniques like premortems (anticipating potential failure modes), crux identification (determining key considerations that would change conclusions), and expert consultations to stress-test findings²².

The Global Health and Development team's process illustrates this approach in practice. Projects begin with client briefs specifying research questions, success criteria, and target audiences. Researchers then conduct literature reviews, expert consultations, and quantitative analyses (often building cost-effectiveness models), before drafting reports that undergo internal review and client iteration. The organization emphasizes making uncertainty visible in analyses rather than presenting false precision²³.

Major Research Outputs and Tools

Moral Weight Project

The Moral Weight Project, launched in May 2021 and running through October 2022, represents one of Rethink Priorities' most ambitious research efforts. The project aimed to develop welfare range estimates for different species to inform cross-species resource allocation decisions. This involved creating an inclusive proxy list of traits potentially relevant to welfare capacity and assessing how different animals score on these proxies²⁴.

However, the project has generated significant debate within the effective altruism community. Critics have argued that the project may be "too animal friendly" due to methodological choices that favor higher animal welfare weights, and that it dismisses hierarchicalism (the view that some types of welfare matter more than others) too readily by assuming unitarianism (equal welfare value across beings)²⁵. The organization acknowledges these concerns and suggests that users who disagree with the underlying assumptions should consider discounting the estimates accordingly.

Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model

The Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model (CCM) attempts to compare interventions across different cause areas—animal welfare, global health, and longtermism—using a common framework. This tool aims to help donors and funders make allocation decisions when faced with opportunities spanning multiple causes²⁶.

External analysis has identified several limitations with the model. It may undervalue longtermist interventions by factors exceeding 10^20, and the default parameters risk becoming de facto standards that bias against certain causes. The model also assumes independence between variables (for example, simulating sentience probabilities and existential risk probabilities independently), which may understate certainty and affect cause rankings under risk aversion. Rethink Priorities has acknowledged these limitations and emphasizes that the model should be viewed as one source of evidence rather than an authoritative answer, describing its scope as "radically incomplete" since it models only interventions of specific interest to the organization²⁷.

AI Safety and Governance Research

Rethink Priorities approaches AI safetyRiskSchemingScheming—strategic AI deception during training—has transitioned from theoretical concern to observed behavior across all major frontier models (o1: 37% alignment faking, Claude: 14% harmful compli...Quality: 74/100 through several interconnected research streams. The organization investigates risk alignment in agentic AI systems—how advanced AI systems capable of undertaking complex actions with minimal supervision should be aligned with human values. This research examines what risk attitudes agentic AIs should adopt, how developers can manage liability and moral obligations when deploying such systems, and technical methods for calibrating AI systems to users' risk preferences²⁸.

On AI safety bounties, the organization has explored programs where security researchers receive rewards for identifying safety issues in AI systems. The research estimates that a well-resourced third-party bounty program defining dangerous capability thresholds could cost up to $500,000 and require four months of operational time. However, the organization notes concerns that "as AI capabilities advance," accident risks and harmful knowledge proliferationRiskAI ProliferationAI proliferation accelerated dramatically as the capability gap narrowed from 18 to 6 months (2022-2024), with open-source models like DeepSeek R1 now matching frontier performance. US export contr...Quality: 60/100 from open-source stress-testing "may outweigh the benefits of bounties"²⁹.

Associate Researcher Oliver Guest has investigated mechanisms for international coordination on AI safety, including proposals to prohibit high-risk training runs and establish verification systems. The research estimates that the longtermist AI governance community should allocate approximately eight full-time equivalents per year (with a 90% confidence interval of four to 12) to international safety agreements work over a two-year period³⁰.

Other Notable Outputs

Rethink Priorities maintains an open database of publicly available reports spanning its research areas. Other significant contributions include analysis of forecasting accuracy on platforms like MetaculusOrganizationMetaculusMetaculus is a reputation-based forecasting platform with 1M+ predictions showing AGI probability at 25% by 2027 and 50% by 2031 (down from 50 years away in 2020). Analysis finds good short-term ca...Quality: 50/100 and PredictionBook, examining how predictors perform across different time horizons; research on cultured meat development timelines and production forecasts; databases of interventions to reduce meat and animal product consumption using the PICOT framework; and case studies of plant-based diet shift initiatives (such as New York City's program that served over 1.2 million plant-based meals between March 2022 and March 2024 with greater than 90% patient satisfaction)³¹.

Impact and Influence

Rethink Priorities claims that its research has influenced significant funding decisions within the effective altruism ecosystem and beyond. The organization reports that by 2023, its research had informed more than $10 million in grants by other organizations. In 2023 alone, the organization worked with approximately 20 clients, consulted for organizations like GiveWell and Coefficient GivingOrganizationCoefficient GivingCoefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) has directed \$4B+ in grants since 2014, including \$336M to AI safety (~60% of external funding). The organization spent ~\$50M on AI safety in 2024...Quality: 55/100, presented at more than 15 academic institutions, and organized 6 convenings³².

The organization has positioned itself as a bridge between academic research and practical implementation. It provides consulting services that include strategic advice to enhance program effectiveness, philanthropic alignment to identify high-impact opportunities, and evidence-based solutions for decision-making. The Global Health and Development team has completed numerous commissioned reports that directly inform grantmaking decisions by major funders³³.

By late 2025, Rethink Priorities reported advising major philanthropic funders with program budgets totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. The organization also noted that its guide for donors amid US foreign aid cuts was cited by the Associated Press, suggesting influence beyond the effective altruism community³⁴.

Through its Special Projects program, Rethink Priorities provides fiscal sponsorship and operational support to external initiatives aligned with effective altruism principles. In 2024, the program sponsored or incubated seven projects with $6.45 million in forecasted expenditure, including organizations like Apollo ResearchOrganizationApollo ResearchApollo Research demonstrated in December 2024 that all six tested frontier models (including o1, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro) engage in scheming behaviors, with o1 maintaining deception in ov...Quality: 58/100 and Epoch. According to testimonials, this support has reduced administrative burdens and enabled faster scaling for these sponsored projects³⁵.

Acknowledged Failures and Criticisms

Self-Identified Mistakes

Rethink Priorities has been notably transparent about its failures and strategic shortcomings. In reflective posts from 2023, the co-founders acknowledged several significant mistakes from the organization's early years³⁶.

The organization's most notable early failure was the PriorityWiki project launched in 2018. According to the founders' retrospective, this project failed because Rethink Priorities did not adequately assess the probability of success, potential value, or required resources before beginning. The project would have required substantial volunteer coordination efforts that the organization was not positioned to execute, and the potential value remained unclear even in a successful scenario³⁷.

The founders identified their biggest early mistake as failing to build clear plans for how each project would influence decision-makers. The organization initially relied too heavily on producing research with the assumption that it would be impactful simply by existing, without establishing concrete pathways to influence. Related to this, Rethink Priorities did not allocate sufficient resources to measuring actual influence and impact. While the organization conducted internal impact tracking, it has not shared this data publicly as extensively as originally planned due to time constraints³⁸.

Additional acknowledged issues include not establishing robust project management systems before scaling in 2022, and struggling with unpredictable project timelines because it was difficult to determine when to stop researching due to diminishing returns. In several cases, according to the organization's own assessment, they spent too long on research pieces and would have achieved greater impact by releasing work earlier³⁹.

The Rethink Grants collaboration in 2019 with Rethink Charity to assess Donational funding opportunities also lacked a clear target audience and underbaked theory of change, despite rigorous quantitative analysis. The organization also noted a shift away from its initial principles emphasizing quick, digestible outputs and short feedback loops, instead prioritizing donor-preferred work over transparency and public explanations due to time constraints⁴⁰.

External Criticisms

The Moral Weight Project has generated the most substantial external criticism. Forum posts on the Effective Altruism Forum have questioned whether the project is "too animal friendly," identifying four critical methodological issues that allegedly bias estimates toward higher animal welfare weights. Critics argue that if you reject the assumptions of the project, then you shouldn’t use their numbers as moral weights⁴¹.

Debates have also emerged around practical applications of the welfare range estimates. For example, discussions about whether to use Rethink Priorities' "mainline" welfare ranges without considering impacts on soil invertebrates like nematodes, mites, and springtails have highlighted tensions between theoretical completeness and practical decision-making. Some critics argue that even highly uncertain effects should not be neglected simply because they are uncertain⁴².

The Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model has faced criticism for potentially undervaluing longtermist interventions by factors exceeding 10^20, with concerns that default parameters risk becoming de facto standards that bias against certain causes. The model's assumption of independence between variables—simulating factors like sentience probabilities and existential risk probabilities separately—may understate certainty and affect cause rankings under risk aversion. Critics have also noted that the model is "radically incomplete" since it only covers interventions of specific interest to Rethink Priorities, making it unsuitable as a general authority on cross-cause prioritization⁴³.

Forecasting Track Record

Rethink Priorities has acknowledged systematic overconfidence in its cultured meat forecasts. Of 273 predictions the organization collected, 84 resolved (9 correct, 75 incorrect), with 40 more pending that were likely to be incorrect by year-end. The organization characterized this as reflecting how cultured meat has been "perpetually just a few years away" since 2010, warranting skepticism of future claims in this domain⁴⁴.

While Rethink Priorities has published detailed evaluations of forecasting platforms like Metaculus and PredictionBook (examining calibration, overconfidence, and accuracy across time horizons), the organization does not publicly disclose a comprehensive, quantified track record of its own organizational predictions or forecasts beyond specific domains like cultured meat. Rethink Priorities provides the code for their analysis of Metaculus' AI predictions in a publically available GitHub repository⁴⁵.

Funding and Organizational Structure

Funding Model and Current Needs

Rethink Priorities operates through a mixed funding model combining commissioned research projects (funded by specific donors and philanthropic organizations) and unrestricted donations. For 2026, the organization identified a core budget need of $7.5 million with capacity to effectively use at least $9.3 million in unrestricted funding for scaling opportunities. According to the organization, unrestricted funding is most valuable because it enables efficiency and allows for time-sensitive opportunities⁴⁶.

Department-specific funding gaps for 2026 include: $2 million for Worldview Investigations (which encompasses AI governance work), $1.785 million for Global Health and Development, and $305,000 for Surveys and Data Analysis. The Animal Welfare department also emphasized seeking sustained funding to support work on neglected species⁴⁷.

In 2024, the Special Projects program managed $6.45 million in forecasted expenditure across seven sponsored projects. This fiscal sponsorship model allows external initiatives to benefit from Rethink Priorities' infrastructure (HR, accounting, operational support) while maintaining programmatic independence⁴⁸.

The organization has earned a 4/4 star rating from Charity Navigator, suggesting strong performance in financial management and accountability, though this rating does not assess research quality or impact⁴⁹.

Leadership and Governance

As of early 2026, Marcus A. Davis serves as sole CEO after a transition from the previous co-CEO structure with Peter Wildeford⁵⁰. The board of directors as of June 2023 included individuals from organizations connected to the effective altruism movement: Marcus Davis (Rethink Priorities), Vicky Bond (The Humane League), Cameron Meyer Shorb (Wild Animal Initiative), Niel Bowerman (80,000 HoursOrganization80,000 Hours80,000 Hours is the largest EA career organization, reaching 10M+ readers and reporting 3,000+ significant career plan changes, with 80% of \$10M+ funding from Coefficient Giving. Since 2016 they'v...Quality: 45/100), Nikolai Vetr (Stanford University), JueYan Zhang, Elysha Png (Vygo), and Abigail Olvera⁵¹.

This board composition reflects Rethink Priorities' integration within the effective altruism ecosystem, with connections to major organizations focused on animal welfare, career advising, and research. The overlap between board members' affiliations and Rethink Priorities' research areas raises potential questions about organizational independence, though no specific conflicts of interest have been publicly documented.

Relationship to Effective Altruism

Rethink Priorities positions itself as a central research organization within the effective altruism movement, though it serves stakeholders beyond this community. The organization's founding mission explicitly aimed to help the effective altruism movement better allocate time and money toward doing good, and its early research agenda focused on priorities within that community⁵².

The organization's research areas align closely with cause prioritization frameworks common in effective altruism: animal welfare (particularly for neglected species), global health and development (with emphasis on cost-effectiveness), global catastrophic risks (including AI safety), and meta-research on the effective altruism movement itself through surveys and analysis. The EA Surveys that Rethink Priorities conducts examine cause prioritization, demographics, and attitudes within the effective altruism community⁵³.

Rethink Priorities' emphasis on quantitative cost-effectiveness analysis, transparent reasoning, and neglectedness as a criterion for research priorities reflects core effective altruism principles. The organization's tools like the Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model and Portfolio Builder are designed specifically to address allocation questions that effective altruists face when deciding between different cause areas⁵⁴.

However, the organization also works with stakeholders outside the effective altruism movement, including academic researchers, policymakers, and mainstream philanthropic organizations. Its consulting work for organizations like GiveWell and presentations at academic institutions suggest efforts to bridge effective altruism research with broader academic and policy communities⁵⁵.

Key Uncertainties

Impact measurement remains challenging: Despite Rethink Priorities' acknowledged commitment to better impact tracking, the organization has not published comprehensive quantitative assessments of how its research has changed decisions. While the organization claims its research informed more than $10 million in grants, the counterfactual impact (what would have happened without Rethink Priorities' research) remains unclear. The organization acknowledged in 2023 that impact assessment is "very difficult" and relies on rough back-of-envelope calculations and retrospectives⁵⁶.

Methodological debates remain unresolved: The controversies surrounding the Moral Weight Project and Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model reflect deeper disagreements about how to compare welfare across species and causes. These are not technical disputes that more research can easily resolve, but rather reflect fundamental philosophical differences about the nature of welfare, moral status, and appropriate risk attitudes. The extent to which Rethink Priorities' specific methodological choices introduce bias—and in which direction—remains contested⁵⁷.

Forecasting accuracy beyond specific domains: While Rethink Priorities has acknowledged systematic overconfidence in cultured meat predictions, the organization's track record in other forecasting domains (AI timelines, global health interventions, policy outcomes) has not been comprehensively evaluated with quantified metrics. This makes it difficult to assess how much weight to place on the organization's predictive work across different areas⁵⁸.

Organizational independence questions: The overlap between Rethink Priorities' board members, funding sources, and research stakeholders within the effective altruism ecosystem raises questions about the organization's independence and potential echo chamber effects. While no specific conflicts of interest have been documented, the concentration of relationships within a relatively small community may create subtle pressures that affect research priorities and conclusions in ways that are difficult to detect or measure.

Generalizability beyond effective altruism: While Rethink Priorities works with some stakeholders outside the effective altruism movement, the extent to which its research frameworks, cost-effectiveness analyses, and conclusions generalize to decision-makers with different values or priorities remains uncertain. The organization's emphasis on expected value maximization and quantitative comparison across disparate causes may have limited appeal or applicability for mainstream funders with different decision-making frameworks.

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