Donating to Pause AI UK seems like a highly effective AI safety donation for several reasons:
Pause AI UK is located in a London which is a key AI, AI safety and government hub in the UK so it potentially has the ability to significantly influence the AI industry.
The organization has an explicit and effective theory of change on its website and has a track record of delivering results.
The organization seems quite lean and cost-efficient for a non-profit in the AI safety space: minimum costs of only £100k per year.
Before I had naively assumed that if an AI safety researcher earned say $50k per year then donating that much per year would have an equivalent impact.
So for me reading this post was an update toward the value of doing AI safety research directly rather than donating money to the field.
I use Toggl for tracking how much time I spend on all work tasks and I highly recommend it. It has both a website and mobile app which I find intuitive. Although using it requires non-zero effort, I find that using Toggl helps me start tasks and feel more intentional and aware about how I spend my time.
Hi Sanjay, I tried answering that question in this comment. In short, I think a few thousand FTEs seems like a minimally sufficient number based on the resources needed to solve similar historical problems.
Here is a new blog post from 2025 on the subject. The new estimates are 600 technical AI safety FTEs and 500 non-technical AI safety FTEs (1100 in total).
I included organizations I was able to find that are focused on or making significant contribution to AGI safety research or non-technical work like governance and advocacy. Regarding the organizations you listed, I never came across them during my search and I will work on including them now.
Estimating the number of FTEs at the non-technical organizations is not straightforward since often only a fraction of the individuals are focused on AI safety. For each organization I guessed what fraction of the total FTEs were focused on AI safety though I may have overestimated in some cases (e.g. in the case of CFI I can decrease my estimate).
Also I'll include more frontier labs in the list of non-technical organizations.
The technical AI safety organizations cover a variety of different areas including AI alignment, AI security, interpretability, and evals with the most FTEs working on empirical AI safety topics like LLM alignment, jailbreaks, and robustness which covers a variety of different risks including misalignment and misuse.
Donating to Pause AI UK seems like a highly effective AI safety donation for several reasons:
Oh right, thanks for pointing that out!
Really great article. Thank you for writing it.
Before I had naively assumed that if an AI safety researcher earned say $50k per year then donating that much per year would have an equivalent impact.
So for me reading this post was an update toward the value of doing AI safety research directly rather than donating money to the field.
I use Toggl for tracking how much time I spend on all work tasks and I highly recommend it. It has both a website and mobile app which I find intuitive. Although using it requires non-zero effort, I find that using Toggl helps me start tasks and feel more intentional and aware about how I spend my time.
Hi Sanjay, I tried answering that question in this comment. In short, I think a few thousand FTEs seems like a minimally sufficient number based on the resources needed to solve similar historical problems.
Here is a new blog post from 2025 on the subject. The new estimates are 600 technical AI safety FTEs and 500 non-technical AI safety FTEs (1100 in total).
I used Gemini Deep Research to discover organizations and then manually visited their websites to create estimates.
I included organizations I was able to find that are focused on or making significant contribution to AGI safety research or non-technical work like governance and advocacy. Regarding the organizations you listed, I never came across them during my search and I will work on including them now.
Thanks for your feedback Sean.
Estimating the number of FTEs at the non-technical organizations is not straightforward since often only a fraction of the individuals are focused on AI safety. For each organization I guessed what fraction of the total FTEs were focused on AI safety though I may have overestimated in some cases (e.g. in the case of CFI I can decrease my estimate).
Also I'll include more frontier labs in the list of non-technical organizations.
The technical AI safety organizations cover a variety of different areas including AI alignment, AI security, interpretability, and evals with the most FTEs working on empirical AI safety topics like LLM alignment, jailbreaks, and robustness which covers a variety of different risks including misalignment and misuse.