SFF 2025 Funding by Cause Area (EA Forum)
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This EA Forum post provides transparency on SFF's 2025 grant allocations, useful for understanding philanthropic priorities and resource flows in the AI safety and biosecurity ecosystem.
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Building effective altruismEffective altruism fundingSurvival and Flourishing
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Summary
A breakdown of the Survival and Flourishing Fund's 2025 grantmaking by cause area, highlighting the allocation of approximately $34 million to AI safety and $6 million to biosecurity. This post provides transparency into how a major EA-aligned funding body is prioritizing existential risk reduction efforts.
Key Points
- •SFF allocated roughly $34 million to AI safety causes in 2025, reflecting the field's growing perceived urgency.
- •Biosecurity received approximately $6 million, indicating continued but comparatively smaller investment relative to AI safety.
- •The post offers a rare public breakdown of a major EA funding body's cause-area priorities.
- •Funding distribution signals where influential philanthropic actors believe marginal resources are most impactful.
- •Useful reference for understanding the broader funding landscape and priorities within the EA/existential risk community.
1 FactBase fact citing this source
| Entity | Property | Value | As Of |
|---|---|---|---|
| Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) | Market Share | 86% | 2025 |
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# SFF 2025 funding by cause area: $34 million to AI (86%), bio (7%), etc.
By JuanGarcia
Published: 2025-09-17
**Summary: this year the** [**Survival and Flourishing Fund allocated $34.33 million**](https://survivalandflourishing.fund/2025/recommendations) **to organizations working to secure humanity’s future, with the vast majority going to AI (~$29MM), followed by biosecurity (~$2.5MM),** and the rest going to various other causes as diverse as fertility, longevity, forecasting, memetics, math research, EA community building, and non-AI/bio global catastrophic risk (GCR) work.
**Context**
The Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) is a philanthropic organization that funds projects and organizations working to reduce global catastrophic risks, strengthen humanity’s long-term resilience, and promote flourishing, often through regranting and expert panels to allocate resources efficiently.
This year I took a particularly in depth look at where SFF allocated its funds and broke down the results by cause area. I figured I would share here the results through a brief post as I think it can be of general interest to others working on organizations that the SFF has funded or might fund.
**Methodology in brief**
I went over the 89 organizations [recommended for funding by SFF in 2025](https://survivalandflourishing.fund/2025/recommendations), doing a brief analysis of their websites to categorize them by cause area, with each organization being allocated to either one or two cause areas. Then I used the amount allocated for each organization and their cause area to estimate how much total funding went to each cause area.
To account for the messiness of some organizations doing multiple different kinds of work, I simply 1) estimated a minimum amount for each cause area counting only organizations I was highly confident did mainly or only work in that area, and 2) I estimated the maximum amount potentially going to a cause area by adding the whole amount of organizations that had this cause area as one or two, representing the case that the allocated money was "earmarked" for that cause area only. Finally, I just averaged over the minimum and maximum amounts as a best guess. For example: the organizations that I'm very confident do AI work amounted to ~$28.1MM. Then if you add the ones that do some AI work and may have been funded primarily for that work, the number would go up to $30.6MM, then my best guess is the average of $29.3MM for AI.
<table style="border-style:none"><tbody><tr><td style="padding:2px 3px;vertical-align:bottom"><code>Funding by cause area</code></td><td style="padding:2px 3px;vertical-align:bottom">Average</td><td style="padding:2px 3px;vertical-align:bottom">Minimum</td><td style="padding:2px 3px;vertical-align:bottom">Maximum</td></tr><tr><td style="padding:2px 3px;vertical-align:bottom">Total</td><td style="pa
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