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AI Safety Field Growth Analysis 2025
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Stephen McAleese
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Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
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An updated version of a 2022 baseline estimate by Stephen McAleese; useful for understanding the scale and growth trajectory of the AI safety field, but relies on author estimates rather than comprehensive verified data.
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Summary
A quantitative analysis tracking growth of the AI safety field from 2010–2025, estimating total FTEs grew from ~400 in 2022 to ~1,100 in 2025 across 119 organizations. Technical AI safety grew at 21% annually in FTEs, while non-technical (policy/governance) work expanded dramatically, now nearly matching technical headcount.
Key Points
- •Total AI safety FTEs estimated at ~1,100 in 2025 (600 technical, 500 non-technical), up from ~400 in 2022
- •Technical AI safety organizations grew at 24% annually; FTEs at 21% annually, following exponential curves
- •Growth accelerated sharply around 2020, correlating with increased public attention on large language models
- •Top technical focus areas are miscellaneous empirical safety research, LLM safety, and interpretability
- •Non-technical AI safety (policy, governance, advocacy) has expanded rapidly, now nearly equal in headcount to technical work
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AI Safety Field Growth Analysis 2025
by Stephen McAleese 27th Sep 2025 3 min read 14 30
Summary
The goal of this post is to analyze the growth of the technical and non-technical AI safety fields in terms of the number of organizations and number of FTEs working in these fields.
In 2022, I estimated that there were about 300 FTEs (full-time equivalents) working in the field of technical AI safety research and 100 on non-technical AI safety work (400 in total).
Based on updated data and estimates from 2025, I estimate that there are now approximately 600 FTEs working on technical AI safety and 500 FTEs working on non-technical AI safety (1100 in total).
Note that this post is an updated version of my old 2022 post Estimating the Current and Future Number of AI Safety Researchers .
Technical AI safety field growth analysis
The first step for analyzing the growth of the technical AI safety field is to create a spreadsheet listing the names of known technical AI safety organizations, when they were founded, and an estimated number of FTEs for each organization. The technical AI safety dataset contains 70 organizations working on technical AI safety and a total of 629 FTEs working at them (67 active organizations and 604 active FTEs in 2025).
Then I created two scatter plots showing the number of technical AI safety research organizations and FTEs working at them respectively. On each graph, the x-axis is the years from 2010 to 2025 and the y-axis is the number of active organizations or estimated number of total FTEs working at those organizations. I also created models to fit the scatter plots. For the technical AI safety organizations and FTE graphs, I found that an exponential model fit the data best.
Figure 1: Scatter plot showing estimates for the number of technical AI safety research organizations by year from 2010 to 2025 with an exponential curve to fit the data. Figure 2: Scatter plot showing the estimated number of technical AI safety FTEs by year from 2010 to 2025 with an exponential curve to fit the data. The two graphs show relatively slow growth from 2010 to 2020 and then the number of technical AI safety organizations and FTEs starts to rapidly increase around 2020 and continues rapidly growing until today (2025).
The exponential models describe a 24% annual growth rate in the number of technical AI safety organizations and a 21% growth rate in the number of technical AI safety FTEs.
I also created graphs showing the number of technical AI safety organizations and FTEs by category. The top three categories by number of organizations and FTEs are Misc technical AI safety research, LLM safety, and interpretability.
Misc technical AI safety research is a broad category that mostly consists
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