Open Philanthropy is passing AI safety university group funding to Kairos

This is a post on behalf of Open Philanthropy’s GCR Capacity Building team announcing that, effective as of the publication of this post, we are closing down our university group funding program and handing over the funding for most university AI safety groups to Kairos, an AI safety field-building organization. You can see their post, announcing their funding program and plans, here.

In our previous post about passing on EA group funding to CEA, we discussed why we’re generally interested in moving our small grants programs elsewhere when possible. While there haven’t previously been clear candidates for taking on monetary support for AI safety groups, we now think Kairos is well-positioned to do so – they have (in our opinion) a strong team and a substantive track record of supporting university AI safety group organizers.

As with our previous changes to this program, we continue to think student groups and their organizers are doing extremely impactful work; this doesn’t reflect any change in our thinking about their value. We think organizers have historically benefitted from having more active support, and we think Kairos will be better-positioned to provide that kind of support than Open Philanthropy has been, historically.