AI Safety Funder Bulletin

Last updated September 1, 2026

This is a digest of funders in the AI safety space. The goal is to give an overview of who is funding in the space that includes the most relevant information for people seeking funds, looking to donate, or looking to work in grantmaking.

These tables are a rough summary of the numbers in the digest and the numbers are often best guesses based on public info; more detail is in the writeup and the footnotes. For funders that do work in multiple cause areas, it only considers grantmaking and staff focused on AIS. Some of the funding may repeat between rows—e.g. Coefficient donating to BlueDot or AISTOF making grants through Manifund—but this shouldn't substantially change the big-picture numbers.

This is intended to be a living document that updates regularly. If you have any corrections, please reach out!

At a glance

Funder name	$ donated in 2025	# grants made in 2025	Expected $ donated in 2026	FTE	General applications	Open RFPs	Accepting donations
Coefficient Giving	$415M1	2312	$1B3	75	—	✓	✓
Longview Philanthropy	$60M4	—	$200M5	15	—	—	✓
OpenAI Foundation	$0	0	$250M6	2	—	—	—
Macroscopic	$30M7	—	$100M8	11	—	—	—
SFF	$35M9	8810	$30M11	9	✓	—	—
Lightcone Commons	$0	0	$35M12	2	✓	—	✓
Schmidt Sciences	$10M13	2714	$20M15	2	—	—	—
AISTOF	—	—	$40M16	1	—	—	—
Manifund	$6M17	14418	$8.6M19	1	✓	—	✓
BlueDot Impact	$020	020	$7.6M21	1	✓	—	—
Transformative AI Fund (formerly LTFF)	$1.2M22	2022	$4M23	1	✓	—	✓

Funder profiles

These are roughly sorted by money moved per year.

▸Coefficient Giving

Website
Background:
- Previously Open Philanthropy, it grew out of a partnership between GiveWell (founded in 2007 by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld) and Good Ventures (foundation started in 2011 by Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz). They're mainly funded by Tuna and Moskovitz, but looking to work with more donors.
Thesis:
- The biggest funder in the space by far; AI safety is one of a dozen cause areas they make grants in. Grants are usually sourced through their own research rather than applications.
By the numbers:
- donations: allocating $1b to catastrophic risks in 2026
- grant sizes: $10k to $50m
- number of grants: the Navigating Transformative AI Fund lists 188 in 2025 ($318.0m) and 66 so far in 2026 ($137.2m); the GCR Opportunities Fund lists 43 ($97.0m) and 11 ($27.0m)
- note that the public grants database understates their AI giving: their $160m grant to Resolution, announced in July 2026, does not appear in it.
- staff: ~198 total. 42 of the 107 staff working on grants are on AI-focused teams (technical AI safety, AI governance and international policy, US AI policy, short timelines special projects, plus GCR capacity building and GCR leadership), and I estimated 75 total by amortizing the staff working on operations, communications, and partnerships.
Recent updates:
- In July 2026 they made a $160m grant to Resolution, Geoffrey Irving's alignment research organization — $108m base plus $52m conditional on hiring and compute needs. Coefficient is Resolution's sole funder to start.
- Their 2026 AI hiring rounds have closed, including the DC-based roles in US AI policy that were due August 2. As of September 2026 the only role on their careers page is a Business Immigration Associate, posted August 18.
- Caleb Watney, a cofounder of the Institute for Progress, joined in July 2026 as their first Managing Director of Public Policy, overseeing US AI policy among other areas.
Get involved:
- Apply for funding:
  - They have open RFPs for:
    - capacity-building (e.g. training and mentorship programs, events, groups, coworking spaces, media, online infrastructure, career advising) — decisions within 3 months
    - career transition funding (e.g. graduate school, internships, or independent study for building career capacity for people working on reducing global catastrophic risk) — decisions within 6 weeks
    - programs and events on global catastrophic risk, effective altruism, and related topics — decisions within 3 months
  - Their GCR capacity building team also takes a general application for work relevant to their goals that doesn't fit one of the programs above.
- Donate: they are recruiting funders giving > $250k/year; reach out to partnerwithus@coefficientgiving.org
- Apply for a job: their only open role as of September 2026 is a Business Immigration Associate (remote, global); otherwise you can express interest here

▸Longview Philanthropy

Website
Background:
- Founded in 2018 by barrister Natalie Cargill, who is now listed simply as Founder; Simran Dhaliwal is CEO.
Thesis:
- Primarily a donor advisor: they design giving strategies for major philanthropists and move most money via grant recommendations, alongside their own funds (Frontier AI Fund, Digital Minds Fund, Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund, and the Emerging Challenges Fund, which they are now closing).
By the numbers:
- donations: they directed over $75m in 2025 and say they expect 2026 to be “substantially bigger”; their (now removed) hiring materials earlier said they aimed to move $200m in 2026.
- staff: 30 listed, 9 of them with AI program titles; around half the org working on AIS gets 15. They describe themselves as “~35 people” including accepted offers.
Recent updates:
- They ran two RFPs in 2026 that have now closed: one on extreme power concentration ($100k–$2m/yr grants plus career funding, closed July 2) and one on digital minds (closed July 24). No grantees have been announced for either.
- In August 2026 they announced they are closing the Emerging Challenges Fund, their public fund, and are no longer accepting new donations to it; donations received through Giving What We Can by September 30, 2026 go into a final grant round. The fund granted more than $3.5m from over 2,000 donors since launching in 2022. Their Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund now takes public donations instead.
Get involved:
- Apply for funding: they post periodic RFPs here, though none are open right now; otherwise opportunities are sourced via proactive research
- Donate: contact form; they're interested in donors giving at least $1m/year for advisory services, and their private funds are open to donors giving over $100k
- Apply for a job: they are hiring a COO / Director of Operations (applications due September 6, 2026); otherwise you can express interest here

▸OpenAI Foundation

Website
Background:
- A nonprofit that owns a large stake in OpenAI, spun off in 2025. Their AI resilience team is run by OpenAI cofounder Wojciech Zaremba.
Thesis:
- They now describe three priority programs: life sciences and curing diseases, AI resilience, and civil society and philanthropy. Their economic futures work has been folded into AI resilience. Within AI resilience, they're focused on bio-resilience, cyber-resilience, AI model safety, and AI's impact on young people.
By the numbers:
- donations: $130m+ in AI resilience grants that they said in June 2026 they were working to finalize
- staff: 2 publicly named in AI resilience (Wojciech Zaremba and Divya Siddarth); they said in August 2026 that the team is “still small”
Recent updates:
- The Foundation still hasn't published a list of the AI resilience grants it described as being finalized in June. The first one to surface was announced by the grantee: SecureBio said in August 2026 that it had received $17.2m to cut its pathogen detection time from fourteen days to three.
- Their other 2026 announcements have been in other programs — $250m for economic futures in May, $50m for the 2026 People-First AI Fund in June, and $100m for a new civil society and philanthropy program on August 13.
- In August 2026 they said they are hiring for more than 20 roles and aim to invest at least $1b over the next year.
Get involved:
- Apply for a job: they're hiring for 18 roles, all in San Francisco, listed here. The most AI-safety-relevant are a Program Officer for AI Model Safety, a Program Director for Formal Methods, and a Chief of Staff for AI Resilience.

▸Macroscopic

Website
Background:
- Swiss nonprofit founded by Ruairi Donnelly, Jonas Vollmer, David Althaus, and Daniel Kestenholz in 2019. Formerly Center for Emerging Risk Research and Polaris Ventures.
Thesis:
- Within AI safety, they're focused on preventing AI misuse, AI welfare, and cooperation between advanced AI systems. They also donate to reason & democracy and animal welfare and do for-profit investing in their areas of interest.
By the numbers:
- donating: up to $100m this year
- grant sizes: $100k to $15m
- staff: 13 listed on their team page, most working on AI-related areas.
Get involved:
- Apply for funding: you can email info@macroscopic.org, though most grants are sourced through proactive research and they don't respond to most proposals
- Donate: they're not seeking donations, but they're happy to advise those donating > $100k
- Apply for a job: no current open roles, but you can express interest here

▸Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF)

Website
Background:
- Founded in 2019 and funded by Jaan Tallinn.
Thesis:
- SFF is a virtual fund focused on organizing grant processes to support the long-term survival and flourishing of sentient life. Most grants go to reducing AI x-risk. Jaan Tallinn's priorities include efforts to restrict AI—datacenter certifications, speed limits, liability laws, labeling requirements, veto committees, and off-switches—as well as constructive efforts to set examples for the positive use of AI—AI assistance for human intelligence, AI healthcare tech, positive moralities, safety specs for AI, and hardware-level AI controls.
By the numbers:
- typically deploy around $30-40m across ~90 grants in recent years; in 2025 they recommended $34.33m across 88 grants
- staff: ~10 people listed at Survival and Flourishing Corp, plus a 2-person board. Recommendations are done by part-time recommenders.
Recent updates:
- The 2026 Main Round, split into Main, Freedom, and Fairness tracks, closed on April 22; recommendations are expected in September 2026.
- They added three themed rounds for 2026 with $2-4m each — climate change (closed June 10), animal welfare (closed June 24), and human self-enhancement and empowerment (closed July 8). Recommendations for these are expected in November 2026.
Get involved:
- Apply for funding: instructions for applying to a Speculation Grant
  - Speculation Grants are faster grants made outside the S-Process timeline. Around 40 people serve as Speculators, each holding a budget of roughly $400-500k to approve them from.
  - Submitting an application also puts you in consideration for the next S-Process Grant round. In fact, being awarded a Speculation Grant is how you guarantee eligibility for a round, and SFF says over 95% of applications evaluated in past rounds received one.
- Donate: They don't appear to be actively soliciting cofunders, but consider reaching out to sff-contact@googlegroups.com.
- Apply for a job: They are currently hiring for a software engineer role.

▸Lightcone Commons

Website
Background:
- Announced by Oliver Habryka in July 2026. Initial funding is coming from Jaan Tallinn ($10m), Dustin Moskovitz (~$5m), two anonymous donors, the LTFF and the AI Risk Mitigation Fund (~$2m each), and others.
Thesis:
- Lightcone Commons is aiming for near-feature-parity with the S-process used by SFF, with several parts redesigned to make the application and evaluation processes less time-intensive, and a round every three months.
By the numbers:
- expecting funders to disburse around $15-25m in the first round
- fees: 5% on top of grants — 3% to Lightcone Commons and 2% to evaluators, lowered for funders moving large amounts
- staff: recommendations done by part-time evaluators, currently Zvi Mowshowitz, Yafah Edelman, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares, Caleb Parikh, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, and Oliver Habryka, with Katja Grace confirmed for future rounds
Recent updates:
- Applications for the first round closed on August 23, 2026, and recommendations are expected around October 23, 2026. Applications are still open on a rolling basis: anything submitted now rolls into the second round, with a response expected around January 23, 2027. No deadline for that round has been published yet.
- In August 2026 the Long-Term Future Fund announced it was closing, and that it would spend down around $2.8m on existing applicants and longtermist projects, primarily through this first round. Lightcone's own funder list puts the LTFF contribution at around $2m, and says its 3% platform and 2% evaluator fees are waived on it.
Get involved:
- Apply for funding: here
  - They also import applications from grantmaking.ai, Manifund, and LTFF.
- Donate: They are looking to onboard donors giving at least $50k: book an onboarding call here.

▸Schmidt Sciences

Website
Background:
- Science-focused foundation funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
Thesis:
- They fund several different areas of science, focused on academic research. Their broader AI portfolio is more focused on beneficial AI in a broad sense and on accelerating AI capabilities, but they also fund research on AI safety.
By the numbers:
- donations: $10m to AI safety in 2025
- staff: 14 in AI, but mostly not focused on AI safety, estimate 2 in AIS
- their AI safety work now runs under the “Science of Trustworthy AI” name; the old AI Safety Science page redirects there
Recent updates:
- All three of their 2026 AI safety RFPs have now closed: the science of trustworthy AI (May 17), interpretability (May 26), and multi-agent safety (August 9). Decisions on the first two were due in summer 2026 and on the third in autumn 2026, but no 2026 awardees have been announced yet.
Get involved:
- Apply for funding:
  - Their joint RFP on multi-agent safety with Google DeepMind, ARIA, the Cooperative AI Foundation, and Google.org — up to $10m across all the funders — closed on August 9, 2026.
  - They have no AI safety RFP open right now, and otherwise don't accept unsolicited proposals. Their interpretability page says to check back later in 2026 for more funding opportunities.
- Apply for a job: They are hiring for scientists, program staff, and fellows in AI here.

▸AI Safety Tactical Opportunities Fund (AISTOF)

Background:
- Founded by JueYan Zhang (former BlackRock PM) in 2023
Thesis:
- A multi-donor fund focused on moving fast to fill time-sensitive gaps.
By the numbers:
- funds raised: > $30m
- grants made: > 150 since September 2023
- their Manifund account, which is only one of their channels, shows $1.75m across 17 grants in 2025 and $2.26m across 24 grants in 2026 through August
- staff: ~1 FTE
Get involved:
- Apply for funding: there's no open application, but consider posting a proposal on Manifund
- Donate: there's no formal way to do so, but you could reach out to JueYan on LinkedIn

▸Manifund

Website
Background:
- Founded in 2023 by Austin Chen (formerly Manifold Markets).
Thesis:
- Manifund is an open platform where everything is public, grants can be turned around in days, and regrantors make independent calls.
By the numbers:
- in 2026 so far (through August 31):
  - $5.7m donated
  - ~140 projects funded
- grant sizes between $0-$500k
- staff: ~1 FTE
Get involved:
- Apply for funding: make a public project proposal at manifund.org
- Donate: you can donate to projects yourself, or donate to regrantors here

▸BlueDot Impact

Website
Background:
- Founded in 2022 as an AI safety training organization. They started making grants at scale in 2026.
Thesis:
- They give fast grants to people and projects working in AI safety and biosecurity, aimed at new projects and individuals.
By the numbers:
- donated: $5.06m across 730 grants, almost all of it in 2026
- staff: 10 listed, none with a grantmaking title; they say they intend to scale to 20, and are recruiting a Program Lead for Career Transition Grants
- funders: Coefficient Giving made them a $25.6m three-year general support grant in 2025
Get involved:
- Apply for funding: they have two grant programs:
  - Career Transition Grants for people switching to work full-time on AI safety or biosecurity — application: 45 minutes, decision time: 20 days
  - Rapid Grants: $50 to $10k for concrete AI safety or biosecurity projects — application: 5 minutes, decision time: 3 days
  - They also run Incubator Week, a 5-day expenses-paid program in San Francisco offering up to $100k in funding if they back your pitch — a much higher ceiling than either grant program. The most recent cohort ran August 24-28, 2026.

▸Transformative AI Fund (TAIF), formerly the Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF)

Website
Background:
- The LTFF started in 2017 as a project of Centre for Effective Altruism. In August 2026 EA Funds closed the LTFF and launched the Transformative AI Fund in its place, with Lowe Lundin as full-time Head of Fund. The LTFF's outgoing managers said the closure was partly about institutional friction around grants to individuals, for-profits, and policy-adjacent work; several of them plan to keep granting part-time through the AI Risk Mitigation Fund and Lightcone Commons.
Thesis:
- Early-stage grants to individuals, new organizations, and existing organizations with new projects. Primary focus is technical AI safety and AI governance, including post-AGI governance, plus field-building and forecasting.
By the numbers:
- the LTFF donated around $5-6m/year through 2024, but only $1.2m in 2025 and $0.3m in the first half of 2026
- number of grants: 100-200/year through 2024, but 20 in 2025 and 6 in the first half of 2026
- grant size: typically $10k-$150k, rarely above $300k — now TAIF's stated policy, not just LTFF's historical pattern
- staff: 1 full-time (Lowe Lundin), hiring a second; advisors Caleb Parikh and Catherine Low are part-time
- stated response time: 6-8 weeks
Recent updates:
- No narrative payout report has been posted since the one covering May 2023 to March 2024, though the grants database is updated through 2026 Q2. TAIF says it will publish its first quarterly report before the end of 2026.
- The LTFF is spending down around $3.7m: roughly $2.8m to existing applicants, mostly through the first Lightcone Commons round, and around $0.9m as a seed grant to TAIF.
Get involved:
- Apply for funding: use this form; applications are rolling. The LTFF is no longer taking new applications, and live LTFF applications were imported into the first Lightcone Commons round.
- Donate: donate to TAIF here; TAIF is actively fundraising beyond its ~$1m seed grant
- Apply for a job: they are hiring an Associate Program Officer (full-time, remote)

▸Not included

Astralis Foundation: They now have a fair bit of public info — named focus areas, named grantees, and a team page listing 11 staff — but they're still not taking unsolicited funding requests. Based on this job posting from late 2025 (now removed from the live job board), they have a fund focused on international AI governance, the Shared Horizons fund, aiming to deploy $15m in 2026; the same posting says Astralis has raised over $20m for AI safety from 15 donors and deployed it to 14 organizations.
Navigation Fund: Jed McCaleb's foundation. At one point they announced they were giving $20m/year to AI safety, but this seems to have not materialized and it's now gone from their website.
AI Risk Mitigation Fund: They announced a spinoff from LTFF in 2023, but haven't made any updates or grant announcements on their website. They're one of the funders of Lightcone Commons, contributing around $2m to its first round. Their apply page says they have no set date for opening applications and currently fund only opportunities they source themselves.
FLI: They were previously more active in grantmaking, but seem to be less focused on it these days. Their PhD fellowship is now paused — they aren't accepting applications in fall 2026 while they reassess the program. Their one open program is the Digital Media Accelerator, which funds AI safety content creators on a rolling basis and doesn't publish grant sizes.
Frontier Model Forum AI Safety Fund: It was funded with $10m in 2023. Most of this was distributed in 2024 and 2025 — their most recent grantees were announced in December 2025 — and they now appear to be winding down and spending their remaining funds.
Foresight AI for Safety and Science: They award around $3m annually across AI safety & science, typically $10k-$100k per grant. They've closed open applications and aren't accepting submissions until they publish new RFPs. They also strongly prefer applicants who will be in-person members of their SF or Berlin hubs.
Astera: Their webpage mentions that they're primarily backing Simplex.
grantmaking.ai: New initiative housed under Manifund, with an initial $1m funded by Anton Makiievskyi, see launch post. That round closed in July 2026; per their results page, all $1m was distributed to 33 projects out of 581 applications, averaging around $30k. No second round has been announced.
AI Forge: A joint DARPA/NSF program launched in June 2026, working with CAISI at NIST, to fund research on AI interpretability, AI control, and adversarial robustness, at roughly $750k-$3m per project. It's restricted to US universities and military service academies, and no administering nonprofit has been publicly named as of September 2026.
ILIAD: They fund new research organizations that meet a high bar of scientific rigor. As of July 2026 they list both a request for proposals (epistemics-raising projects and theory-driven research on ReLU networks) and a rolling open call for research projects — but still don't publish grant sizes or deadlines.

▸Notes

Using public grants on https://coefficientgiving.org/funds for the Navigating Transformative AI Fund ($318.0M in 2025) and the GCR Opportunities Fund ($97.0M), totalling $415.0M as of September 1, 2026. I don't know what the total of nonpublic AIS grants was; their 2025 letter from the CEO says they directed over $1B across all cause areas in 2025.
Filtering https://coefficientgiving.org/funds by year gives 188 grants in 2025 for the Navigating Transformative AI Fund and 43 for the GCR Opportunities Fund. These counts still grow as back-dated grants are published.
Per Luke Muehlhauser's post.
Per this post from a Longview team member, they directed over $60M in 2025, more than 2x their 2024 figure. Their August 2026 COO job postingsays “We directed over $75 million to high-impact organizations in 2025, and expect 2026 will be substantially bigger,” but that figure covers all of Longview's giving rather than AI safety specifically.
Longview's hiring materials said “In 2026, we aim to move $200 million — making us the second largest funder in that field.” That page has since been taken down; an archived copy survives. As of September 2026 no live Longview page states a 2026 target — their COO postingsays only that they expect 2026 to be “substantially bigger” than 2025.
Estimate: as of June 2026 they saidthey were working to finalize more than $130M in grants through their AI resilience program, “to be shared publicly soon and with more to come,” and planning to give away at least $1B across all programs over the next year. The Foundation has still not published an AI resilience grantee list; the first grant to surface was announced by the grantee, SecureBio, which said in August 2026 that it had received $17.2M for its pathogen-detection work.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/macroscopic-ventures
Macroscopic's grants pagesays “This year, we plan to give up to $100m in total to organizations and individuals in our focus areas.” Their job posting says they are deploying “up to $100+ million this year.”
https://survivalandflourishing.fund/2025/recommendations
https://survivalandflourishing.fund/2025/recommendations
Per SFF's announcement, they are planning to give $20–40M.
Private communications
https://www.schmidtsciences.org/new-10-million-ai-safety-science-program-launched-for-foundational-research/
https://www.schmidtsciences.org/new-10-million-ai-safety-science-program-launched-for-foundational-research/
Estimate: totals for their 2026 AI safety RFPs were not published. The live page for the 2026 Science of Trustworthy AI RFP has since been taken down; an archived copy survives.
Private communications
https://manifund.org/about
Distinct projects that received funding in 2025.
Around $5.7M donated between January 1 and August 31, 2026, per the data behind manifund.org/about, extrapolated to a full year.
Treated as zero: their published list of rapid grants shows only 16 grants totalling about $10.7k made between June and December 2025, negligible at the scale of this table. They began granting at scale in 2026, and Career Transition Grants only launched in May 2026.
Their grant pages reported 671 rapid grants ($1,545,745) and 59 career transition grants ($3,513,485) as of September 1, 2026 — about $5.0M of it in 2026 — extrapolated to a full year.
LTFF grants recorded for 2025 in the EA Funds grants database. That database is incomplete: it lists 693 LTFF grants totalling $30.2M all-time, while the fund's own successor announcement says LTFF made 820+ grants totalling just under $35M since 2017. The payout chart on EA Funds' own fund pages shows the higher figure — 821 grants totalling $35.3M — so roughly 128 grants and $5.2M are missing from the public database.
The LTFF closed in August 2026 with around $3.7M left: roughly $2.8M for existing applicants, mostly through the first Lightcone Commons round, and around $0.9M seeding the Transformative AI Fund, which is fundraising for more.

Other resources

See another database of AIS funding at https://aisafety.com/funding and subscribe to their newsletter at https://aisafetyfunding.substack.com/. Manifund also launched Trace in August 2026, a database tracking $2.8b of AI safety funding across 4,500+ grants and 700+ funders going back to 2003, available as a website, an API, and a bulk download.