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.

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.

Thanks for your feedback Ben.

I totally agree with point 1. and you're right that this post is really estimating the total number of people who work at AI safety organizations and then using this number as a proxy for estimating the size of the field. As you said, there are a lot of people who aren't completely focused on AI safety but still make significant contributions to the field. For example, a AI researcher might consider themselves to be an "LLM researcher" and split their time between non-AI safety work like evaluating models on benchmarks and AI safety work like new alignment methods. Such a researcher would not be counted in this post.

I might add an "other" category to the estimate to avoid this form of undercounting.

Regarding point 2, I collected the list of organizations and estimated the number of FTEs at each using a mixture of Google Search and Gemini Deep Research. The lists are my attempt to find as many AI safety organizations as possible though of course, I may be missing a few. If you can think of any that aren't in the list, I would appreciate if you shared them so that I can add them.

Thanks for the insightful observation! I think the reason why the graph starts to flatten out in 2025 simply because it's only September of 2025 so all the organizations that will be founded in 2025 aren't included in the dataset yet.

I would like to see a push towards increasing donations to x-risk reduction and longtermist charities. Last time I checked, only about 10% of GWWC donations were going to longtermist funds like the Long-Term Future Fund. Consequently, I think the x-risk and AI safety funding landscapes have been more reliant on big donors than they should be.

I think avoiding existential risk is the most important thing. As long as we can do that and don't have some kind of lock in, then we'll have time to think about and optimize the value of the future.