Center for AI Safety, Inc.

They did the CAIS Statement on AI Risk, helped SB 1047 get as far as it did, and have improved things in many other ways. Some of these other ways are non-public. Some of those non-public things are things I know about and some aren’t. I will simply say the counterfactual policy world is a lot worse. They’ve clearly been punching well above their weight in the advocacy space. The other arms are no slouch either, lots of great work here. Their meaningful rolodex and degree of access is very strong and comes with important insight into what matters.

They take a lot of big swings and aren’t afraid of taking risks or looking foolish. I appreciate that, even when a given attempt doesn’t fully work.

If you want to focus on their policy, then you can fund their 501(c)(4), the Action Fund, since 501c(3)s are limited in how much they can spend on political activities, keeping in mind the tax implications of that. If you don’t face any tax implications I would focus first on the 501(c)(4).

We should definitely find a way to fund at least their core activities.

Donate to the Action Fund for funding political activities, or the 501(c)(3) for research. They can be contacted at contact@safe.ai.

Main points in favor of this grant

• The premise and theory of change is strong. There’s a need for such a platform.
• The team has journalism and editorial experience.
• CAIS has strong networks with academics and researchers; the project has already seen interest from a variety of external contributors.

Donor's main reservations

• Sustaining a high rate of high-quality contributions may be challenging.
• May require significant marketing to build readership and visibility.

Process for deciding amount

I reviewed a budget.

Conflicts of interest

I will be advising this project.

Center for AI Safety does safety research and advocates for safety standards. It has a good track record so far:

• It drafted the original version of SB 1047.
• Its Statement on AI Risk got signatures from major figures in AI and helped bring AI x-risk into the Overton window.
• It’s done some other work (e.g., writing an AI safety textbook; buying compute for safety researchers) that I like but I don’t think is as impactful. The given examples are about supporting alignment research, and as I’ve said, I’m not as bullish on alignment research.
• The Center for AI Policy Action Fund does lobbying, which might be good, but I can’t find much public information about what it lobbies for. It did support SB 1047, which is good.
• It’s led by Dan Hendrycks. I’ve read some of his writings and I get the general sense that he’s competent.

The Center for AI Safety has some work that I’m very optimistic about (most notably the Statement on AI Risk), but I’m only weakly to moderately optimistic about most of its activities.

It has received $9 million from Open Philanthropy (1, 2) and just under $1 million from the Survival and Flourishing Fund.

I have a good impression of the Center for AI Safety, but it’s not one of my top candidates because (1) it’s already well-funded and (2) it has done some things I really like, but those are diluted by a lot of things I only moderately like.