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[Linkpost] An update from Good Ventures
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Alexander_Berger
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This EA Forum linkpost summarizes a strategic funding update from Good Ventures and Open Philanthropy, relevant for understanding philanthropic dynamics, funding concentration risks, and the broader AI safety and GCR funding ecosystem.
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Building effective altruismGood VenturesAnnouncements and updatesArtificial sentienceCoefficient GivingEffective altruism fundingOrganization updates
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Summary
Good Ventures announced it is exiting a small number of sub-causes and will not expand into new areas, while continuing to grow grantmaking in existing focus areas through Open Philanthropy. Alexander Berger highlights structural risks of single-funder dependency, particularly for global catastrophic risk work, and signals Open Phil will raise its grantmaking bar while prioritizing support for other philanthropists. This update has significant implications for funding diversification in AI safety and related fields.
Key Points
- •Good Ventures is exiting fewer than 5% of annual grantmaking sub-causes and will not expand into new cause areas in the near term.
- •Open Phil acknowledges structural risks from over-reliance on a single major funder, especially in global catastrophic risk and AI safety fields.
- •Open Phil will raise its bar for recommending grants, shifting focus toward cultivating and supporting other philanthropists.
- •Funding diversification in AI safety, biosecurity, and other GCR fields supported by Good Ventures is now identified as more critical.
- •Affected grantees face real negative impacts, underscoring the ecosystem-level vulnerability of having concentrated philanthropic funding.
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[Linkpost] An update from Good Ventures — EA Forum
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by Alexander_Berger Jun 14 2024 2 min read 143 213
Building effective altruism Good Ventures Announcements and updates Artificial sentience Coefficient Giving Effective altruism funding Organization updates Frontpage This is a linkpost for https://www.goodventures.org/blog/an-update-from-good-ventures/ Edit: See this comment below for an update from October 1, 2025.
I wanted to share this update from Good Ventures (Cari and Dustin’s philanthropy), which seems relevant to the EA community.
Tl;dr: “while we generally plan to continue increasing our grantmaking in our existing focus areas via our partner Open Philanthropy, we have decided to exit a handful of sub-causes (amounting to less than 5% of our annual grantmaking), and we are no longer planning to expand into new causes in the near term by default.”
A few follow-ups on this from an Open Phil perspective:
I want to apologize to directly affected grantees (who've already been notified) for the negative surprise here, and for our part in not better anticipating it.
While this represents a real update, we remain deeply aligned with Good Ventures (they’re expecting to continue to increase giving via OP over time), and grateful for how many of the diverse funding opportunities we’ve recommended that they’ve been willing to tackle.
An example of a new potential focus area that OP staff had been interested in exploring that Good Ventures is not planning to fund is research on the potential moral patienthood of digital minds. If any readers are interested in funding opportunities in that space, please reach out .
Good Ventures has told us they don’t plan to exit any overall focus areas in the near term. But this update is an important reminder that such a high degree of reliance on one funder (especially on the GCR side) represents a structural risk. I think it’s important to diversify funding in many of the fields Good Ventures currently funds, and that doing so could make the funding base more stable both directly (by diversifying funding sources) and indirectly (by lowering the time and energy costs to Good Ventures from being such a disproportionately large funder).
Another implication of these changes is that going forward, OP will have a higher bar for recommending grants that could draw on limited Good Ventures bandwidth, and so our program staff will face more constraints in terms of what they’re able to fund. We always knew we weren’t funding every worthy thing out there, but that will be even more true going forward. Accordingly, we expect marginal opportunities for other funders to look stronger going forward.
Historically, OP has been focused on finding enough outstanding giving opportunities to hit Good Ventures’ spending targets, with a long-t
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