Last month, Anthropic announced Mythos Preview, the most powerful cyberweapon in history, capable of finding and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser. Meanwhile, many frontier AI company employees increasingly expect full automation of AI R&D in the next year or two, followed by the rapid automation of thousands of other important tasks and jobs.
This pace of technological change is unprecedented, and the world is not prepared. Very little of the commercial, government, and nonprofit infrastructure we need to respond to these transformative changes has been built.
To meet this challenge, dozens of philanthropists are hoping to deploy tens of billions of dollars in philanthropy and impact investments in AI safety and governance in the next several years alone.[1] But most of this capital is bottlenecked on a tiny number of grant and investment advisors who can identify and vet specific funding opportunities, and create new ones by headhunting project founders.
That's why the AI teams at Coefficient Giving (CG) are hiring grantmakers and senior generalists, and why I think the next people we hire will be among the highest-leverage people in AI safety.[2] Please apply here.
As a new AI grantmaker at CG,[3] you'd likely move >$30 million, and plausibly >$100 million, in your first year, funding dozens or hundreds of people to work full-time on projects we think will address catastrophic risks from AI. Because grant investigation capacity is tight, hiring one fewer grantmaker usually means those millions will just sit in an account for another year rather than being deployed to useful ends. And when a strong candidate turns down a CG offer, the result is often not “a slightly-less-good grantmaker," it’s just one fewer grantmaker. We routinely close rounds with fewer hires than we'd planned for.
We fund a mix of:
- proposals that come our way via a Request for Proposals or otherwise, often with some creative steering and reshaping by the investigator
- renewals of past grantees, with a special focus on ambitiously scaling-up the best performers
- strategy-driven creation of new grantees. We do this by (a) identifying a critical gap in the ecosystem, (b) headhunting a strong founder for a new project that would address the gap, and (c) helping them spin up the new project quickly and ambitiously. There are dozens of new projects we think need to be spun up, e.g. (i) a high-credibility AI company scorecard project, (ii) projects to build and advocate better chain of thought monitoring or agreement verification technology, additional specialized third-party auditors, and many more.)
As our AI timelines shorten, we've shifted more focus to (3) since many critical gaps remain that we haven't gotten good applications for. We've had strong success with this so far, but the strategy work and headhunting of (3) requires far more staff capacity per dollar moved than (1) or (2) do, so we need to grow our grantmaker capacity as quickly as we can.[4] (Also, to make this shift we had to close this RFP, but we'd rather have the staff capacity to do both!)
CG is an excellent place to do this work, because we have (among other things):
- Resources. We expect to move in the neighborhood of $1 billion in AI grantmaking from Good Ventures (our primary funding partner) in 2026, plus more from dozens of other AI safety funders we are advising, some of which have billions in philanthropic capacity.
- Experience. Our staff have more AI safety grantmaking experience than anyone else. We've made hundreds of AI grants since 2015, and we benefit from over a decade of learning via (a) watching what impact those grants did or didn't have, and (b) special funder access to private information about grantees and grantee impacts.
- Strong colleagues. I won't belabor this, but CG is a talent-dense organization full of thoughtful, capable, and deeply kind people, all of whom are working toward common goals.
Please apply here, and help address a key bottleneck to helping the world prepare for the arrival of transformative AI. We recently extended the application deadline to May 24 due to insufficient applications, so your application could really change how many people we are able to hire!
This post is written from an AI team's perspective. CG's Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness team is also hiring, but I'll let people closer to that work speak to it. See e.g. here. ↩︎
For the rest of this post I'll focus on grantmaking rather than grantmaking and impact investing, since CG advises more grants than impact investments. ↩︎
Available founders are another bottleneck for (3), but grantmaker capacity can be converted into additional founders by spending more time on founder search, and much of our success with (3) so far has come from finding people outside our immediate networks who have been successful at building large new grantees addressing critical gaps. ↩︎
When Julian Hazell wrote a previous version of this post, I asked "Can you explain what the bottleneck is to having there be more AI grantmakers? It seems like there are always many bright young people who want to work for EA charities - what prevents the charities that need more grantmakers from hiring some of them?"
He answered that grantmakers needed to be "Relatively senior (6+ years of work experience?) AI-safety-focused people."
If this is true, I think it changes the calculus enough that first of all, I'm no longer surprised you're having trouble finding them, and second of all, I think you should make it clear in posts like this (and in the job description/ad). Otherwise, you get the failure mode where EA orgs say "Help, we so desperately need more people," and then thousands of very smart people put in lots of effort to apply, and the org says "Oh no, not any of you guys". This is the main reason I no longer respond to posts like this by urging my seemingly-suitable friends to apply for positions.
But also, I'm confused by the failure mode of "because grant investigation capacity is tight, hiring one fewer grantmaker usually means those millions will just sit in an account for another year rather than being deployed to useful ends". I can name right now five organizations that can absorb an extra $10 million in ways that I think are net positive in expectation from within CG's world-model (for example, not really thought through, just as proof of concept, Palisade, Apollo, METR, MATS, Tarbell).
Or to put it another way, SFF temp-hires people who have been in the community a while, but maybe don't have six years AI safety experience, to be temporary grantmakers (disclosure: sometimes including me). They investigate the situation for a month or two and move millions of dollars to various orgs like the five mentioned above based on common-sense models like that they seem good and underfunded. It seems like either this works and is easy (in which case CG should be able to do it) or hard (in which case SFF is net negative and should stop - if this were true I'd like to know it so I could stop supporting them). I still can't figure out the world-model in which SFF exists and is net positive, CG is begging for more grantmakers, and all these organizations still aren't fully funded.
I hadn't seen Julian's comment and I don't fully agree with it.
Our needs vary over time and between roles. Some roles ~require several years of prior work experience (the more senior roles, specialist roles like infosec expert or China expert), but generalist grantmaker roles are often suitable for people straight out of undergrad or during/after grad school — e.g. on my team, that describes Trevor, Julian, Nick, and Catherine when we hired them, and they all moved tons of money, contributed to team-level strategy, etc. in their first 18mo. That said, there are only so many early-career folks we can hire before we need additional more-experienced management capacity to take them on.
Re: grantees. I'll skip commenting on specific groups here, but here are some reasons that orgs can still have funding gaps even if we at CG agree they're performing well and could probably spend more money productively: (a) they're trying to diversify funders, and non-CG money is scarcer than CG money, (b) they could spend money in net-positive ways, but not above our ROI bar on the current margin, (c) they acquired 'room for more funding' recently, but we funded them not too long ago and can't afford to investigate new RFMF claims for every grantee every few months, (d) they're in our queue to investigate for renewal/expansion, but we don't have staff capacity to do it anytime soon. In some cases the issue might also be "Scott heard they could spend more money but actually they just got approved for a huge CG grant and that info hasn't propagated yet."
Re: SFF. I'm not familiar with many of the grantees in the latest batch. Many are previous CG grantees we're happy to fund generously, and I'm guessing a lot of those were cases of (a)-(d) above. In some cases I know of specific information that makes me bearish, and I wonder if grantmakers with more time and context would make the same decision.
But another point is that probably a majority of the FTE we acquire from this hiring round will (at least for my team) go into a mix of strategy development (for specific areas, like AI character or infosecurity or strategic communications) and "active grantmaking" (identify key gaps from the strategy work, outline and org/project that would address the gap, headhunt a founder for it) which usually takes a ton more time and context than "opportunitistic grantmaking" (responding to applications that come your way, which afaik is ~all SFF grants).
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
It strikes me that this implies it would be very useful if you were able to share some information with SFF about which bucket various applications fell into.
Maybe you can be more specific going forward, then? It's easy to interpret your original post as a plea for smart people to help, but it sounds like your audience for these posts are much narrower.
To be fair, CG's grant to OpenAI looks fairly terrible with the benefit of hindsight. That does seem to suggest that AI grantmaking should be done with care, or something of that nature. But I would say that problem would be better fixed through public reflection on what went wrong with the OpenAI grant, as opposed to just trying to monopolize more talent. It would really suck if CG is monopolizing talent for an organization that is fundamentally broken at a structural incentives level, e.g. excessive focus on prestige-maxxing.
>Palisade, Apollo, METR, MATS, Tarbell
For other readers who thought, "Wait, are those not getting CG funding?" Almost all of those orgs have been funded by CG, most within the last year. Maybe not at the level Scott's talking about though.
FWIW I don't actually agree with this interpretation, but I see how my comment could have been confusing.
Let me try to clarify:
Yes, in fact, what they really need are individuals who can offer profound insights, conceptual frameworks, and solutions—not necessarily as hired employees, but potentially as collaborators.
(I'll note that I'm qualified to be a grantmaker for the area of human intelligence amplification, which many leaders in AI safety view as a crucial second or third priority behind "stop AI" and "at least try to solve alignment". But it seems like a waste of my time to apply to be a grantmaker at CG without some indication that they'd be open to this. I did message a couple people hoping for a quick "nah" or "worth applying" but didn't hear back.)
fyi @lukeprog wrote this elsewhere in the comments, though it doesn't adequately address your (excellent) points
My outsider impression is that CG is so bottlenecked on grantmakers because of having a relatively high epistemic bar for giving out grants (ie CG grantmakers spend a fair amount of time developing detailed inside views about grants). What’s the case for hiring more grantmakers rather than lowering the rigorousness bar?
I’m guessing the answer might be something like “active grantmaking produces much better grants at the current margin”. My own heuristic (from doing a bit of incubator work) is that it’s usually more effective to found one thing yourself than to get others to found a couple of things, because it’s hard to convey a vision and also hard to find someone talented enough who isn’t already doing something equally good or better. Interested in your takes on that!
I've seen a lot of posts that we need a lot more AI safety grantmakers. I feel like I want to do a bit of rough math and just see if that's the case. There is this estimate for the number of FTEs in AI safety by Stephen Mcaleese from Sept 2025 and 2022. Let's extrapolate exponential growth and say there are ~1400 FTEs on AI safety right now. Let's also assume from Julian Hazell's post that there are ~50 full-time AI safety grantmakers (though I think it's probably a bit more than that, given CG, Astralis, Astera, Longview, SFF, independent grantmakers, FLI, UK AISI, ARIA, AISTOF, Navigation Fundpeople at Schmidt, Macroscopic, etc., LTFF, Bluedot grants, Manifund, Tarbell, etc.).
From what I know about CG and other grantmakers, the people there are quite talented, and I would speculate are more talented than the average grantee.
Right off the bat, that means that right now, about 28 FTEs are working in AIS per grantmaker. Not to mention, a lot of the people who work full-time in AIS are working at frontier labs or other for-profit companies like Goodfire or in government (like UK AISI, CAISI), who don't need grantmakers to evaluate/fund their work. But we can ignore all those and just stick with the 28 FTE number.
I think I would expect the average grantmaker to be able to handle more than that, especially since an average organization usually has ~10 FTEs on average (I just asked Claude), and I expect a typical grantmaker to handle much more than 3 grants.
Also, I suspect a lot of grants look a lot more like renewals, and so don't need nearly as much review. For example, I'd expect grants to MATS and Redwood to look a lot more like reviewing their plans and signing off on them.
What am I missing?
(I work as a grantmaker at CG, but I’m speaking for myself not Luke here)
Since somebody nudged me to reply to this. I didn't find this reply very convincing.
First, I agree that work pulling people into AI safety is/will be more time-consuming. Other than that, though,
This seems off to me. Surely you'd agree that if the ratio were 1:1 or something, we would say "ok, some people who are currently grantmaking need to be doing direct work". Not everyone can just be funding things.
I mean, maybe that's another one to consider, but it still feels less relevant. A lot of people think that the denominator in this case is infinite/(nearly) all humans.
I actually don't think this necessarily implies that we should get a lot more people into grantmaking. This could just mean that there is a lot of money available and that grantmakers should move into roles on the ground (direct work)
I appreciate you raising this and I'm interested to see how people will answer. However, some weak counter-considerations come to mind:
If accurate, that ratio of grantmakers to employed specialists looks rather low compared with what I understand it to be in many other fields, and I'm thinking of fields like space technology which have 75 page grant applications requiring specialist knowledge to evaluate and monitor, and government subsidy programmes whose application volume is sufficiently high to have <5% funding rates and which have painful audit requirements.
Also wonder how much EA organizations use part time external reviewers to evaluate grants, which is the standard way of broadening evaluations and removing bottlenecks? (although I can see getting AI specialists who both work in industry/research and are truly independent might be more challenging)
tbh this comment section is giving out far more insights than the post itself lol. One could almost believe that CG and most other organizations in the space are far more concerned with playing status games by reminding everyone that their posted job roles got a 0.02% acceptance ratio.
You'll have a hard time convincing me that the main reason behind extending the application deadline isn't because they looked at the total number of applications and decided this wouldn't look good enough as a denominator.
Anyone who's been through the humiliation ritual of applying to any of these jobs/fellowships knows the game all too well. We keep getting "invitation to apply" emails, we keep reading that "there are not enough people in AI safety!" on forum and social media posts. But when we jump through all these hoops, we're greeted with "oh there were just too many of you applying!"
And when you press any of these organization heads or recruitment managers about why you're not getting into their jobs or fellowship programs, they say they'd love to take everyone who was eligible, but they simply don't have enough funding.
The entire recruitment strategy behind this space is a giant motte-and-bailey approach meant to clown job applicants around.
Getting rejected from a role you're not qualified for is fine. What's not fine is every org in this space, whether they're advertising jobs or fellowships, constantly writing in their job descriptions "if you're in doubt about your suitability for this role, we encourage you to apply!"
Why though? Why are they encouraging people to waste hours of their lives on applications they were never going to seriously consider? They should just be honest and say: "we expect you to already have put in 1000 hours in AI safety (preferably working with our friends) before we'll even look at your application."
Why post minimum desired qualifications that make regular, unimpressive talent think they'll have a chance? Why not filter them out immediately so they don't bother clicking on the apply button?
The EA/AI safety application process is humiliating enough for committed "high-impact professionals" as it is. Ultimately, this entire post reads as tone-deaf and insulting to the people who actually bothered applying, knowing full well there was a 99% probability that they'd get rejected anyway.
That being said, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to a hiring manager's plight in this day and age. Of course I know that the majority of applications they're getting are AI slop by randos with no exposure or knowledge of the space.
Even so, I strongly doubt that they're not getting at least 10 qualified and eligible people for each role that they post — and that's an extremely conservative estimate.
Hell, if you are getting even one qualified person but choosing to leave supposedly critical, world-saving roles open because candidates lack some subjective, nonsensical "fit", then you aren't actually talent-constrained... You're just playing status games.
Strong agree
Thank you for this. I agree that there is an urgent need for more grantmakers, based on my own experience and on conversations with people who are actively involved in the space.
I have thought about this a little and discussed it with some grantmakers at Coefficient Giving, so I wanted to briefly mention a few ideas in case they have not already been considered.
First, have you considered headhunting strong forecasters or superforecasters? My intuition is that demonstrated forecasting ability may be a useful signal of grantmaking potential.
Second, have you considered making grants specifically aimed at improving the grantmaker pipeline? I think there are many possible projects and programmes that could increase the supply of capable grantmakers, and it would be very valuable to support more work in this area, both for Coefficient Giving and for the community as a whole.
Third, one specific pipeline project I would encourage you to consider is a more tiered grantmaking ecosystem. I suspect that many people would be willing and able to start by making microgrants, similar to BlueDot Rapid Grants, or by doing part-time grantmaking, similar to SFF. Their performance could then be evaluated, and the most promising people could gradually be given more responsibility and a larger grantmaking budget.
For example, I could imagine a Coefficient microgranting programme that is open to a wider range of people and explicitly presented as a potential pathway into a full-time grantmaking role. Another possibility would be for Coefficient Giving to direct more near-miss applicants toward opportunities where they can gain relevant grantmaking experience, while also providing more support to related organisations that could help develop this talent.
My impression is that the bar for a grantmaking role at Coefficient Giving is currently so high that many promising people may not be willing or able to spend their scarce time and motivation on an intense application process, especially if the odds of success seem low and they are not yet sure whether they would be good at the work. A more gradual pathway could help reduce these barriers while also giving Coefficient Giving better evidence about who is likely to perform well.
Why? Shouldn't you make an offer to the runner-up?
In some cases we do, but we have a high bar for overall "fit for the role," we don't hire people below that bar, and so we often end a hiring round with too-few applicants ending up above our bar (as far we can assess at that time with limited investment by both us and the candidate). We maintain this high bar for several reasons, one of which is that managers' time is also scarce and high opportunity cost.
"managers' time is also scarce and high opportunity cost" doesn't seem like enough in my opinion to warrant "millions will just sit in an account for another year". I'm curious to know what the other "several reasons" are. I fear that some people are vain about who they associate with and insist on being part of a "talent-dense" organization, such that they will set a bar unproductively high
Could you specify what you mean by “fit for the role”?
Often subjective terms like these are just used to justify arbitrary discrimination (not necessarily of the illegal kind).
Strong upvoted! Great post, definitely agree more people should consider transitioning into grantmaking. Especially since research is so power-law distributed, I think many current technical / governance researchers would have much higher counterfactual impact deploying tens of millions of dollars as opposed to e.g. writing another paper. Downstream of a similar post I wrote, I'm currently working on a project to address the grantmaker bottleneck. Would be keen to connect! Have DM'd.
Also, for any grantmakers reading this, please reach out to me if you're interested in e.g. helping create a BlueDot AI Safety Grantmaking Fundamentals course curriculum or doing mentorship!
Hey Sophie,
I have quite a lot (decades) of grant making and grant administration experience.
Happy to brainstorm with you if you're interested in pulling together an introductory level course etc. Send me a DM :)
Have you considered leaving rounds open longer and/or hiring slightly-less-good grantmakers instead of closing the round?
To expand, posts like these give me https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/someone-who-is-good-at-the-economy-please-help-me vibes.
"Someone who is good at finding grantmakers please help, life on my planet might get wiped out if we don't fund saving it"
"Hire people who are maybe not quite as elite-of-the-elite-tier talent as you hoped, since they can still do a ton of good"
"no"
Case in point: this comment thread https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/B6d8Wzk4gNzHsXvdi/ai-safety-is-extremely-bottlenecked-on-grantmakers?commentId=KFBL4pezAbYLcWzTE