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The case for AI safety capacity-building work

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2026·EA Forum·forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rAqKSSXankvys2Fzu/the-c...

Author

abergal

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

An EA Forum post making the strategic case for prioritizing field-building and institutional capacity in AI safety; relevant for those thinking about how to grow and sustain the AI safety research ecosystem.

Forum Post Details

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169
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4
Forum
eaforum
Forum Tags
AI safetyCareer choiceCause prioritizationBuilding the field of AI safetyField-building

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Importance: 52/100analysis

Summary

This EA Forum post argues for the importance of capacity-building efforts within the AI safety field, making the case that growing the number of skilled researchers, organizations, and institutions working on AI safety is a high-leverage intervention. It likely addresses bottlenecks in talent, funding, and organizational infrastructure that limit the field's ability to address existential risks from advanced AI.

Key Points

  • •Capacity-building work (growing talent pipelines, organizations, and infrastructure) is a critical but underrated lever for advancing AI safety progress.
  • •The AI safety field faces significant bottlenecks in human capital and institutional capacity relative to the scale of the problem.
  • •Investing in training, mentorship, and organizational development can have compounding long-term effects on the field's effectiveness.
  • •Capacity-building may be especially valuable given the expected growth of AI capabilities and the need for proportional safety research scaling.
  • •The post likely situates capacity-building as complementary to direct technical and governance research rather than a substitute.

Cached Content Preview

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# The case for AI safety capacity-building work

By abergal
Published: 2026-03-10
TL;DR:

*   I think many of the marginal hires at larger organizations doing AI safety technical or policy work right now (including e.g. Apollo, Redwood, METR, RAND, GovAI, Epoch, UKAISI, and Anthropic’s safety teams) would be capable of founding (or being early employees of) organizations focused on building capacity in AI safety, and would have more impact by doing so.
*   I think the impact case for this kind of work is supported by first-principles arguments ([the multiplier effect](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/promoting-effective-altruism/#multiplier-effect)), larger-scale survey work my team at Coefficient Giving has done, and many individual conversations we’ve had with people who are working on AI risk, which suggest that past capacity-building work has had large and predictable effects on people working on AI safety now. 

* * *

*Cross-posted from* [*Multiplier*](https://multipliercg.substack.com/p/the-case-for-ai-safety-capacity-building)

I work on the [capacity-building team](https://coefficientgiving.org/funds/navigating-transformative-ai/funding-for-work-that-builds-capacity-to-address-risks-from-transformative-ai/) on the Global Catastrophic Risks-half of Coefficient Giving (formerly known as Open Philanthropy). Our remit is, roughly, to increase the amount of talent aiming to prevent unprecedented, globally catastrophic events. These days, we’re mostly focused on AI, and we’ve funded a number of projects and grantees that readers of this post might be familiar with– including MATS, BlueDot Impact, Constellation, 80,000 Hours, CEA, the Curve, [FAR.AI](http://far.ai)’s events, university groups, and many other workshops and projects.

The post aims to make the case that broadly, capacity-building work (including on AI risk) has been and continues to be extremely impactful, and to encourage people to consider pursuing relevant projects and careers.

This post is written from my personal perspective; that said, my sense is that a number of CG staff and others in the AI safety space share my views. I include some quotes from them at the [end of this post](#Social_proof).

I’m writing this post partly out of a desire to correct what I perceive as an asymmetry in terms of how excited I and others at Coefficient Giving are about this kind of work vs. how much people in the EA and AI safety communities seem excited to work on it. The capacity-building team is one of three major teams working on AI risk at Coefficient; we currently have 11 staff, which is ⅓ of the total AI grantmaking capacity, and gave away over $150M in 2025. I started my stint at Coefficient Giving in 2021, working half-time on technical AI safety grantmaking and half-time on capacity-building grantmaking; among other reasons, I ultimately switched to working full-time on capacity-building, because my sense was that team was several times (maybe an order of magnitude) more impa

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