Nonprofit research organization founded in 1986 focused on nanotechnology, secure AI, neurotechnology, longevity biotechnology, and existential hope. Operates through grants, prizes (Feynman Prize since 1993), fellowships, and conferences rather than direct laboratory research. Recently expanded into AI safety grantmaking (~$1.5M in 2024) and planned AI Nodes hubs.
Revenue
$9.4 million
as of 2024
Total Funding Raised
$290,000
as of 2023
Grants Made
$333K
73 grants
Key Metrics
Revenue (ARR)
$9.4M2024
Facts
11
Financial
Annual Expenses$3.8 million
Revenue$9.4 million
Total Funding Raised$290,000
General
Websitehttps://foresight.org
Organization
Founded Date1986
HeadquartersSan Francisco, CA
Other
ProgramAI Nodes — planned physical hubs in San Francisco and Berlin providing grant funding, office/event space, and compute resources for AI safety and AI-for-science researchers. ~$5M raised toward $7M target as of early 2026.
Cooperative AIApproachCooperative AICooperative AI research addresses multi-agent coordination failures through game theory and mechanism design, with ~$1-20M/year investment primarily at DeepMind and academic groups. The field remai...Quality: 55/100
Analysis
Carlsmith's Six-Premise ArgumentAnalysisCarlsmith's Six-Premise ArgumentCarlsmith's framework decomposes AI existential risk into six conditional premises (timelines, incentives, alignment difficulty, power-seeking, disempowerment scaling, catastrophe), yielding ~5% ri...Quality: 65/100
Other
RLHFResearch AreaRLHFRLHF/Constitutional AI achieves 82-85% preference improvements and 40.8% adversarial attack reduction for current systems, but faces fundamental scalability limits: weak-to-strong supervision shows...Quality: 63/100Christine PetersonPersonChristine PetersonCo-founder and Projects Director of Foresight Institute. Nanotechnology advocate credited with coining the term "open-source software" in its modern software community sense (1998).K. Eric DrexlerPersonK. Eric DrexlerCo-founder of Foresight Institute. Pioneer in nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing. Author of foundational works on molecular machine systems.James C. BennettPersonJames C. BennettCo-founder and Director of Foresight Institute. Co-founder of commercial space launch companies and consultant in space and technology.Peter DiamandisPersonPeter DiamandisAdvisor to Foresight Institute. Founder of X-Prize Foundation. Chaired Feynman Grand Prize committee (2004). Entrepreneur and author focused on exponential technologies.
Organizations
Future of Humanity InstituteOrganizationFuture of Humanity InstituteThe Future of Humanity Institute (2005-2024) was a pioneering Oxford research center that founded existential risk studies and AI alignment research, growing from 3 to ~50 researchers and receiving...Quality: 51/100Future of Life InstituteOrganizationFuture of Life InstituteComprehensive profile of FLI documenting $25M+ in grants distributed (2015: $7M to 37 projects, 2021: $25M program), major public campaigns (Asilomar Principles with 5,700+ signatories, 2023 Pause ...Quality: 46/100ManifundOrganizationManifundManifund is a $2M+ annual charitable regranting platform (founded 2022) that provides fast grants (<1 week) to AI safety projects through expert regrantors ($50K-400K budgets), fiscal sponsorship, ...Quality: 50/100GovAIOrganizationGovAIGovAI is an AI policy research organization with ~40-45 staff, funded primarily by Coefficient Giving ($1.8M+ in 2023-2024), that has trained 100+ governance researchers through fellowships and cur...Quality: 43/100LessWrongOrganizationLessWrongLessWrong is a rationality-focused community blog founded in 2009 that has influenced AI safety discourse, receiving $5M+ in funding and serving as the origin point for ~31% of EA survey respondent...Quality: 44/100VitaDAOOrganizationVitaDAOCommunity-funded longevity research DAO. Members vote on biotech projects and share resulting IP. Flagship DeSci (Decentralized Science) project. 20+ projects funded with millions deployed.
Concepts
Brain-Computer InterfacesCapabilityBrain-Computer InterfacesComprehensive analysis of BCIs concluding they are irrelevant for TAI timelines (<1% probability of dominance) due to fundamental bandwidth constraints—current best of 62 WPM vs. billions of operat...Quality: 49/100Whole Brain EmulationCapabilityWhole Brain EmulationComprehensive analysis of whole brain emulation finding <1% probability of arriving before AI-based TAI, with scanning speed (100,000x too slow for human brains) as the primary bottleneck despite r...Quality: 48/100AI Scaling LawsConceptAI Scaling LawsEmpirical relationships between compute, data, parameters, and AI performanceQuality: 92/100FTX Collapse: Lessons for EA Funding ResilienceConceptFTX Collapse: Lessons for EA Funding ResilienceThe November 2022 collapse of FTX resulted in approximately $160M in committed EA grants that were not disbursed, organizational restructuring across the ecosystem, and revealed structural vulnerab...Quality: 78/100
Key Debates
The Case For AI Existential RiskArgumentThe Case For AI Existential RiskComprehensive formal argument that AI poses 5-14% median extinction risk by 2100 (per 2,788 researcher survey), structured around four premises: capabilities will advance, alignment is hard (with d...Quality: 66/100The Case Against AI Existential RiskArgumentThe Case Against AI Existential RiskComprehensive synthesis of skeptical arguments against AI x-risk from prominent researchers (LeCun, Marcus, Ng, Brooks), concluding x-risk probability is <5% (likely ~2%) based on challenges to sca...Quality: 58/100