Last year I gave my reasoning on cause prioritization and did shallow reviews of some relevant orgs. I'm doing it again this year.
Cross-posted to my website.
Cause prioritization
In September, I published a report on the AI safety landscape, specifically focusing on AI x-risk policy/advocacy.
The prioritization section of the report explains why I focused on AI policy. It's similar to what I wrote about prioritization in my 2024 donations post, but more fleshed out. I won't go into detail on cause prioritization in this post because those two previous articles explain my thinking.
My high-level prioritization is mostly unchanged since last year. In short:
- Existential risk is a big deal.
- AI misalignment risk is the biggest existential risk.
- Within AI x-risk, policy/advocacy is much more neglected than technical research.
In the rest of this section, I will cover:
What I want my donations to achieve
By donating, I want to increase the chances that we get a global ban on developing superintelligent AI until it is proven safe.
"The Problem" is my favorite article-length explanation of why AI misalignment is a big deal. For a longer take, I also like MIRI's book.
MIRI says:
On our view, the international community’s top immediate priority should be creating an “off switch” for frontier AI development. By “creating an off switch”, we mean putting in place the systems and infrastructure necessary to either shut down frontier AI projects or enact a general ban.
I agree with this. At some point, we will probably need a halt on frontier AI development, or else we will face an unacceptably high risk of extinction. And that time might arrive soon, so we need to start working on it now.
This Google Doc that explains why I believe a moratorium on frontier AI development is better than "softer" safety regulations. In short: no one knows how to write AI safety regulations that prevent us from dying. If we knew how to do that, then I'd want it; but since we don't, the best outcome is to not build superintelligent AI until we know how to prevent it from killing everyone.
That said, I still support efforts to implement AI safety regulations, and I think that sort of work is among the best things one can be doing, because:
- My best guess is that soft safety regulations won't prevent extinction, but I could be wrong about that—they might turn out to work.
- Some kinds of safety regulations are relatively easy to implement and would be a net improvement.
Safety regulations can help us move in the right direction, for example:
- Whistleblower protections and mandatory reporting for AI companies make dangerous behavior more apparent, which could raise concern for x-risk in the future.
- Compute monitoring makes it more feasible to shut down AI systems later on.
- GPU export restrictions make it more feasible to regulate GPU usage.
My ideal regulation is global regulation. A misaligned AI is dangerous no matter where it's built. (You could even say that if anyone builds it, everyone dies.) But I have to idea how to make global regulations happen; it seems that you need to get multiple countries on board with caring about AI risk and you need to overcome coordination problems.
I can think of two categories of intermediate steps that might be useful:
- Public advocacy to raise general concern about AI x-risk.
- Regional/national regulations on frontier AI, especially regulations in leading countries (the United States and China).
A world in which the USA, China, and the EU all have their own AI regulations is probably a world in which it's easier to get all those regions to agree on an international treaty.
There is no good plan
People often criticize the "pause AI" plan by saying it's not feasible.
I agree. I don't think it's going to work.
I don't think more "moderate" AI safety regulations will work, either.
I don't think AI alignment researchers are going to figure out how to prevent extinction.
I don't see any plan that looks feasible.
"Advocate for and work toward a global ban on the development of unsafe AI" is my preferred plan, but not because I like the plan. It's a bad plan. I just think it's less bad than anything else I've heard.
My P(doom) is not overwhelmingly high (it's in the realm of 50%). But if we live, I expect that it will be due to luck. I don't see any way to make a significant dent on decreasing the odds of extinction.
AI pause advocacy is the least-bad plan
I don't have a strong argument for why I believe this. It just seems true to me.
The short version is something like "the other plans for preventing AI extinction are worse than people think" + "pausing AI is not as intractable as people think" (mostly the first thing).
The folks at MIRI have done a lot of work to articulate their position. I directionally agree with almost everything they say about AI misalignment risk (although I'm not as confident as they are). I think their policy goals still make sense even if you're less confident, but that's not as clear, and I don't think anyone has ever done a great job of articulating the position of "P(doom) is less than 95%, but pausing AI is still the best move because of reasons XYZ".
I'm not sure how to articulate it either; it's something I want to spend more time on in the future. I can't do a good job of it on this post, so I'll leave it as a future topic.
How I've changed my mind since last year
I'm more concerned about "non-alignment problems"
Transformative AI could create many existential-scale problems that aren't about misalignment. Relevant topics include: misuse; animal-inclusive AI; AI welfare; S-risks from conflict; gradual disempowerment; risks from malevolent actors; moral error.
I wrote more about non-alignment problems here. I think pausing AI is the best way to handle them, although this belief is weakly held.
I'm more concerned about "AI-for-animals"
By that I mean the problem of making sure that transformative AI is good for non-humans as well as humans.
This is a reversion to my ~2015–2020 position. If you go back and read My Cause Selection (2015), I was concerned about AI misalignment, but I was also concerned about an aligned-to-humans AI being bad for animals (or other non-human beings), and I was hesitant to donate to any AI safety orgs for that reason.
In my 2024 cause prioritization, I didn't pay attention to AI-for-animals because I reasoned that x-risk seemed more important.
This year, in preparation for writing the AI safety landscape report for Rethink Priorities, they asked me to consider AI-for-animals interventions in my report. At first, I said I didn't want to do that because misalignment risk was a bigger deal—if we solved AI alignment, non-humans would probably end up okay. But I changed my mind after considering a simple argument:
Suppose there's an 80% chance that an aligned(-to-humans) AI will be good for animals. That still leaves a 20% chance of a bad outcome. AI-for-animals receives much less than 20% as much funding as AI safety. Cost-effectiveness maybe scales with the inverse of the amount invested. Therefore, AI-for-animals interventions are more cost-effective on the margin than AI safety.
So, although I believe AI misalignment is a higher-probability risk, it's not clear that it's more important than AI-for-animals.
How my confidence has increased since last year
We should pause frontier AI development
Last year, I thought a moratorium on frontier AI development was probably the best political outcome. Now I'm a bit more confident about that, largely because—as far as I can see—it's the best way to handle non-alignment problems.
Peaceful protests probably help
Last year, I donated to PauseAI US and PauseAI Global because I guessed that protests were effective. But I didn't have much reason to believe that, just some vague arguments. In April of this year, I followed up with an investigation of the strongest evidence on protest outcomes, and I found that the quality of evidence was better than I'd expected. I am now pretty confident that peaceful demonstrations (like what PauseAI US and PauseAI Global do) have a positive effect. The high-quality evidence looked at nationwide protests; I couldn't find good evidence on small protests, so I'm less confident about them, but I suspect that they do.
I also wrote about how I was skeptical of Stop AI, a different protest org that uses more disruptive tactics. I've also become more confident in my skepticism: I've been reading some literature on disruptive protests, and the evidence is mixed. That is, I'm still uncertain about whether disruptive protests work, but my uncertainty has shifted from "I haven't looked into it" to "I've looked into it, and the evidence is ambiguous, so I was right to be uncertain." (I've shifted from one kind of "no evidence" to the other.) For more, see my recent post, Do Disruptive or Violent Protests Work?
I have a high bar for who to trust
Last year, I looked for grantmakers who I could defer to, but I couldn't find any who I trusted enough, so I did my own investigation. I've become increasingly convinced that that was the correct decision, and I am increasingly wary of people in the AI safety space—I think a large minority of them are predictably making things worse.
I wrote my thoughts about this in a LessWrong quick take. In short, AI safety people/groups have a history of looking like they will prioritize x-risk, and then instead doing things that are unrelated or even predictably increase risk. So I have a high bar for which orgs I trust, and I don't want to donate to an org if it looks wishy-washy on x-risk, or if it looks suspiciously power-seeking (a la "superintelligent AI will only be safe if I'm the one who builds it"). I feel much better about giving to orgs that credibly and loudly signal that AI misalignment risk is their priority.
Among grantmakers, I trust the Survival & Flourishing Fund the most, but they don't make recommendations for individual donors. SFF has a Futher Opportunities page, which shows where they would like to see additional donations go. They are also matching donations on some of their 2025 grants through the end of the year; donors may be especially interested in giving to orgs where they can get matching.
My favorite interventions
In the report I published this September, I reviewed a list of interventions related to AI and quickly evaluated their pros and cons. I arrived at four top ideas:
- Talk to policy-makers about AI x-risk
- Write AI x-risk legislation
- Advocate to change AI (post-)training to make LLMs more animal-friendly
- Develop new plans / evaluate existing plans to improve post-TAI animal welfare
The first two ideas relate to AI x-risk policy/advocacy, and the second two are about making AI go better for animals (or other non-human sentient beings).
For my personal donations, I'm just focusing on x-risk.
At equal funding levels, I expect AI x-risk work to be more cost-effective than work on AI-for-animals. The case for AI-for-animals is that it's highly neglected. But the specific interventions I like best within AI x-risk are also highly neglected, perhaps even more so.
I'm more concerned about the state of funding in AI x-risk advocacy, so that's where I plan on donating.
A second consideration is that I want to support orgs that are trying to pause frontier AI development. If they succeed, that buys more time to work on AI-for-animals. So those orgs help both causes at the same time.
Organizations (tax-deductible)
I'm not qualified to evaluate AI policy orgs, but I also don't trust anyone else enough to delegate to them, so I am reviewing them myself.
I have a Google doc with a list of every relevant organization I could find. Unlike in my 2024 donation post, I'm not going to talk about all of the orgs on the list, just my top contenders. For the rest of the orgs I wrote about last year, my beliefs have mostly not changed.
I separated my list into "tax-deductible" and "non-tax-deductible" because most of my charitable money is in my donor-advised fund, and that money can't be used to support political groups. So the two types of donations aren't coming out of the same pool of money.
AI-for-animals orgs
As I mentioned above, I don't plan on donating to orgs in the AI-for-animals space, and I haven't looked much into them. But I will briefly list some orgs anyway. My first impression is that all of these orgs are doing good work.
Compassion in Machine Learning does research and works with AI companies to make LLMs more animal-friendly.
NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy conducts and supports foundational research on the nature of nonhuman minds, including biological and artificial minds.
Open Paws creates AI tools to help animal activists and software developers make AI more compassionate toward animals.
Sentience Institute conducts foundational research on long-term moral-circle expansion and digital-mind welfare.
Sentient Futures organizes conferences on how AI impacts non-human welfare (including farm animals, wild animals, and digital minds); built an animal-friendliness LLM benchmark; and is hosting an upcoming war game on how AGI could impact animal advocacy.
Wild Animal Initiative mostly does research on wild animal welfare, but it has done some work on AI-for-animals (see Transformative AI and wild animals: An exploration.
AI Safety and Governance Fund
The AI Safety and Governance Fund does message testing) on what sorts of AI safety messaging people found compelling. More recently, they created a chatbot that talks about AI x-risk, which they use to feed into their messaging experiments; they also have plans for new activities they could pursue with additional funding.
I liked AI Safety and Governance Fund's previous project, and I donated $10,000 because I expected they could do a lot of message testing for not much money. I'm more uncertain about its new project, or how well message testing can scale. I'm optimistic, but not optimistic enough for the org to be one of my top donation candidates, so I'm not donating more this year.
Existential Risk Observatory
Existential Risk Observatory writes media articles on AI x-risk, does policy research, and publishes policy proposals (see pdf with a summary of proposals).
Last year, I wrote:
My primary concern is that it operates in the Netherlands. Dutch policy is unlikely to have much influence on x-risk—the United States is the most important country by far, followed by China. And a Dutch organization likely has little influence on United States policy. Existential Risk Observatory can still influence public opinion in America (for example via its TIME article), but I expect a US-headquartered org to have a greater impact.
I'm less concerned about that now—I believe I gave too little weight to the fact that Existential Risk Observatory has published articles in international media outlets.
I still like media outreach as a form of impact, but it's not my favorite thing, so Existential Risk Observatory is not one of my top candidates.
Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)
The biggest news from MIRI in 2025 is that they published a book. The book was widely read and got some endorsements from important people, including people who I wouldn't have expected to give endorsements. It remains to be seen what sort of lasting impact the book will have, but the launch went better than I would've predicted a year ago (perhaps in the 75th percentile).
MIRI's 2026 plans include:
- growing the comms team and continuing to promote the book;
- talking to policy-makers, think tanks, etc. about AI x-risk;
- growing the Technical Governance team, which does policy research on how to implement a global ban on ASI.
I'm less enthusiastic about policy research than about advocacy, but I like MIRI's approach to policy research better than any other org's. Most AI policy orgs take an academia-style approach of "what are some novel things we can publish about AI policy?" MIRI takes a more motivated approach of "what policies are necessary to prevent extinction, and what needs to happen before those policies can be implemented?" Most policy research orgs spend too much time on streetlight-effect policies; MIRI is strongly oriented toward preventing extinction.
I also like MIRI better than I did a year ago because I realized they deserve a "stable preference bonus".
In My Cause Selection (2015), MIRI was my #2 choice for where to donate. In 2024, MIRI again made my list of finalists. The fact that I've liked MIRI for 10 years is good evidence that I'll continue to like it.
Maybe next year I will change my mind about my other top candidates, but—according to the Lindy effect—I bet I won't change my mind about MIRI.
The Survival and Flourishing Fund is matching 2025 donations to MIRI up to $1.3 million.
Palisade Research
Palisade builds demonstrations of the offensive capabilities of AI systems, with the goal of illustrating risks to policy-makers. My opinion on Palisade is mostly unchanged since last year, which is to say it's one of my favorite AI safety nonprofits.
They did not respond to my emails asking about their fundraising situation. Palisade did recently receive funding from the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) and appeared on their Further Opportunities page, which means SFF thinks Palisade can productively use more funding.
The Survival and Flourishing Fund is matching 2025 donations to Palisade up to $900,000.
PauseAI US
PauseAI US was the main place I donated last year. Since then, I've become more optimistic that protests are net positive.
Pause protests haven't had any big visible effects in the last year, which is what I expected, but it's a weak negative update that the protests haven't yet gotten traction.
I did not list protests as one of my favorite interventions; in the abstract, I like political advocacy better. But political advocacy is more difficult to evaluate, operates in a more adversarial information environment, and less neglected. There is some hypothetical political advocacy that I like better than protests, but it's much harder to tell whether the real-life opportunities live up to that hypothetical.
PauseAI US has hired a full-time lobbyist. He's less experienced than the lobbyists at some other AI safety orgs, but I know that his lobbying efforts straightforwardly focus on x-risk instead of doing some kind of complicated political maneuvering that's hard for me to evaluate, like what some other orgs do. PauseAI US has had some early successes but it's hard for me to judge how important they are.
Something that didn't occur to me last year, but that I now believe matters a lot, is that PauseAI US organizes letter-writing campaigns. In May, PauseAI US organized a campaign to ask Congress members not to impose a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation; they have an ongoing campaign in support of the AI Risk Evaluation Act. According to my recent cost-effectiveness analysis, messaging campaigns look valuable, and right now nobody else is doing it. It could be that these campaigns are the most important function of PauseAI US.
Video projects
Recently, more people have been trying to advocate for AI safety by making videos. I like that this is happening, but I don't have a good sense of how to evaluate video projects, so I'm going to punt on it. For some discussion, see How cost-effective are AI safety YouTubers? and Rethinking The Impact Of AI Safety Videos.
Non-tax-deductible donation opportunities
I didn't start thinking seriously about non-tax-deductible opportunities until late September. By late October, it was apparent that I had too many unanswered questions to be able to publish this post in time for giving season.
Instead of explaining my position on these non-tax-deductible opportunities (because I don't have one), I'll explain what open questions I want to answer.
There's a good chance I will donate to one of these opportunities before the end of the year. If I do, I'll write a follow-up post about it (which is why this post is titled Part 1).
AI Policy Network
AI Policy Network advocates for US Congress to pass AI safety regulation. From its description of The Issue, it appears appropriately concerned about misalignment risk, but it also says
AGI would further have large implications for national security and the balance of power. If an adversarial nation beats the U.S. to AGI, they could potentially use the power it would provide – in technological advancement, economic activity, and geopolitical strategy – to reshape the world order against U.S. interests.
I find this sort of language concerning because it appears to be encouraging an arms race, although I don't think that's what the writers of this paragraph want.
I don't have a good understanding of what AI Policy Network does, so I need to learn more.
Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI)
Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI) is the sort of respectable-looking org that I don't expect to struggle for funding. But I spoke to someone at ARI who believes that the best donation opportunities depend on small donors because there are legal donation caps. Even if the org as a whole is well-funded, it depends on small donors to fund its PAC.
I want to put more thought into how valuable ARI's activities are, but I haven't had time to do that yet. My outstanding questions:
- How cost-effective is ARI's advocacy (e.g. compared to messaging campaigns)? (I have weak reason to believe it's more cost-effective.)
- How much do I agree with ARI's policy objectives, and how much should I trust them?
- ARI is pretty opaque about what they do. How concerned should I be about that?
ControlAI
ControlAI is the most x-risk-focused of the 501(c)(4)s, and the only one that advocates for a pause on AI development. They started operations in the UK, and this year they have expanded to the US.
Some thoughts:
- ControlAI's open letter calling for an international treaty looks eminently reasonable.
- ControlAI had success getting UK politicians to support their statement on AI risk.
- They wrote a LessWrong post about what they learned from talking to policy-makers about AI risk, which was a valuable post that demonstrated thoughtfulness.
- I liked ControlAI last year, but at the time they only operated in the UK, so they weren't a finalist. This year they are expanding internationally.
ControlAI is tentatively my favorite non-tax-deductible org because they're the most transparent and the most focused on x-risk.
Congressional campaigns
Two state representatives, Scott Weiner and Alex Bores, are running for US Congress. Both of them have sponsored successful AI safety legislation at the state level (SB 53 and the RAISE Act, respectively). We need AI safety advocates in US Congress, or bills won't get sponsored.
Outstanding questions:
- The bills these representatives sponsored were a step in the right direction, but far too weak to prevent extinction. How useful are weak regulations?
- How likely are they to sponsor stronger regulations in the future? (And how much does that matter?)
- How could this go badly if these reps turn out not to be good advocates for AI safety? (Maybe they create polarization, or don't navigate the political landscape well, or make the cause of AI safety look bad, or simply never advocate for the sorts of policies that would actually prevent extinction.)
Encode
Encode does political advocacy on AI x-risk. They also have local chapters that do something (I'm not clear on what).
They have a good track record of political action:
Encode is relatively transparent and relatively focused on the big problems, although not to the same extent as ControlAI.
Where I'm donating
All of the orgs on my 501(c)(3) list deserve more funding. (I suspect the same is true of the 501(c)(4)s, but I'm not confident.) My favorite 501(c)(3) donation target is PauseAI US because:
- Someone should be organizing protests. The only US-based orgs doing that are PauseAI US and Stop AI, and I have some concerns about Stop AI that I discussed last year and above.
- Someone should be running messaging campaigns to support good legislation and oppose bad legislation. Only PauseAI US is doing that.
- PauseAI US is small and doesn't get much funding, and in particular doesn't get support from any grantmakers.
In other words, PauseAI US is serving some important functions that nobody else is on top of, and I really want them to be able to keep doing that.
My plan is to donate $40,000 to PauseAI US.
Changelog
2025-11-22: Corrected description of AI Safety and Governance Fund.
2025-11-29: Corrected description of Survival & Flourishing Fund's donation matching.
Thanks a lot for the post! Just wanted to say that your posts (especially the one you made last year) have inspired a large part of my donations.
Of the almost $30k I donated over the last year, 70% went to AI policy orgs (mainly Palisade Research). I'm not sure where I would have donated without your posts, but I can't say with certainty that they would have ended up the same place.
I love hearing that my writing helps! And Palisade is doing important work and I think they're a good place to donate.