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We're no longer "pausing most new longtermist funding commitments"
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This post is significant for understanding how a major AI safety funder responded to the FTX collapse and recalibrated its grantmaking strategy, directly affecting funding flows to AI safety and biosecurity organizations in 2023.
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Building effective altruismCoefficient GivingEffective altruism fundingLongtermismOrganization updates
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Summary
Open Philanthropy announced the end of its November 2022 pause on longtermist funding, which had been triggered by FTX's collapse and declining Meta stock. To establish a new funding bar, the organization ranked nearly all grants made over 18 months and estimated sustainable annual spending levels over 20-50 years, enabling resumed grantmaking in AI safety, biosecurity, and EA community growth at a higher bar than previously applied.
Key Points
- •The funding pause, initiated in November 2022 due to FTX collapse and Meta stock decline, was lifted approximately one month before this post was published.
- •Open Philanthropy ranked nearly all grants from the prior 18 months using quantitative impact estimates and grantmaker intuition to establish a new funding bar.
- •The organization estimated sustainable annual spending levels over 20-50 years to anchor its revised longtermist grantmaking budget.
- •Resumed grantmaking covers AI safety, biosecurity & pandemic preparedness, and EA community growth, but at a higher bar than historically applied.
- •The post signals a shift toward more rigorous, value-based bar-setting rather than purely budget-based allocation for longtermist funding.
Cited by 2 pages
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Longtermism's Philosophical Credibility After FTX | -- | 50.0 |
| Pause AI | Organization | 59.0 |
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We're no longer "pausing most new longtermist funding commitments" — EA Forum
This website requires javascript to properly function. Consider activating javascript to get access to all site functionality. Hide table of contents We're no longer "pausing most new longtermist funding commitments"
by Holden Karnofsky Jan 30 2023 7 min read 39 203
Building effective altruism Coefficient Giving Effective altruism funding Longtermism Organization updates Frontpage We're no longer "pausing most new longtermist funding commitments" What did we do to come up with new guidance on where the bar is? What is the bar now? A note on budget-based vs. value-based bar-setting Notes 39 comments
In November, I wrote about Open Philanthropy’s soft pause of new longtermist funding commitments:
We will have to raise our bar for longtermist grantmaking: with more funding opportunities that we’re choosing between, we’ll have to fund a lower percentage of them. This means grants that we would’ve made before might no longer be made, and/or we might want to provide smaller amounts of money to projects we previously would have supported more generously ..
Open Philanthropy also need[s] to raise its bar in light of general market movements (particularly the fall in META stock) and other factors ... the longtermist community has been growing; our rate of spending has been going up; and we expect both of these trends to continue. This further contributes to the need to raise our bar ...
It’s a priority for us to think through how much to raise the bar for longtermist grantmaking, and therefore what kinds of giving opportunities to fund. We hope to gain some clarity on this in the next month or so, but right now we’re dealing with major new information and don’t have a lot to say about what it means. It could mean reducing support for a lot of projects, or for relatively few ...
Because of this, we are pausing most new longtermist funding commitments (that is, commitments within Potential Risks from Advanced Artificial Intelligence , Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness , and Effective Altruism Community Growth ) until we gain more clarity, which we hope will be within a month or so ...
It’s not an absolute pause: we will continue to do some longtermist grantmaking, mostly when it is time-sensitive and seems highly likely to end up above our bar (this is especially likely for relatively small grants).
Since then, we’ve done some work to assess where our new funding bar should be, and we have created enough internal guidance that the pause no longer applies. (The pause stopped applying about a month ago, but it took some additional time to write publicly about it.)
What did we do to come up with new guidance on where the bar is?
What we did:
Ranking past grants: We created 1 a rough ranking of nearly all the grants we’d made over the last 18 months; we also included a number of grants now-defunct FTX-associated fun
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