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AI Safety Field Growth Analysis 2025
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Stephen McAleese
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
A useful reference for researchers and funders assessing the scale and growth rate of the AI safety field; numbers should be cross-checked against other workforce surveys as FTE estimates in this field vary significantly by methodology.
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77
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13
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eaforum
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AI safetyBuilding effective altruismBuilding the field of AI safetyAI governanceData on the EA communityField-buildingResearch
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Importance: 55/100blog postanalysis
Summary
A longitudinal study tracking the growth of the AI safety field from 2010 to 2025, documenting expansion from approximately 400 to 1,100 full-time equivalent researchers across both technical and non-technical domains. The analysis provides quantitative benchmarks for understanding the field's scaling trajectory and workforce development over 15 years.
Key Points
- •Field grew from ~400 to ~1,100 full-time equivalent researchers between 2010 and 2025, representing roughly a 2.75x increase.
- •Tracks both technical AI safety (alignment, interpretability) and non-technical (governance, policy, field-building) workforce growth.
- •Covers a 15-year period, providing one of the more comprehensive longitudinal datasets on AI safety as a professional field.
- •Useful for assessing whether field growth is keeping pace with AI capabilities development and identifying workforce gaps.
- •Published on EA Forum, situating it within effective altruism community efforts to evaluate and prioritize AI safety interventions.
Review
This analysis provides a detailed quantitative examination of the AI safety field's evolution, revealing significant growth particularly after 2020. Using a combination of data collection and exponential modeling, the research demonstrates a 21-24% annual growth rate in technical AI safety organizations and full-time equivalents (FTEs). The study covers both technical domains like interpretability, LLM safety, and agent foundations, as well as non-technical areas including governance, policy, and advocacy.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
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| AI Safety Field Building and Community | Crux | 0.0 |
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AI Safety Field Growth Analysis 2025 — EA Forum
This website requires javascript to properly function. Consider activating javascript to get access to all site functionality. Hide table of contents AI Safety Field Growth Analysis 2025
by Stephen McAleese Sep 27 2025 3 min read 13 77
AI safety Building effective altruism Building the field of AI safety AI governance Data on the EA community Field-building Research Frontpage AI Safety Field Growth Analysis 2025 Summary Technical AI safety field growth analysis Non-technical AI safety field growth analysis Acknowledgements Appendix Old and new dataset and model comparison Technical AI safety organizations table Non-technical AI safety organizations table 13 comments 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 645 FTEs working at them (68 active organizations and 620 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
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