Open Philanthropy

Open Philanthropy is a grantmaking organization funded chiefly by Facebook and Asana cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, whose founders and many early employees, according to Semafor, "were sympathetic to the utilitarian philosophical movement known as effective altruism." Known earlier as GiveWell Labs, it was launched in 2011, and the couple's fortune has contributed most of the roughly 7 billion dollars it had given away by September 2026. It renamed itself Coefficient Giving in November 2025. Its chief executive since 2023, Alexander Berger, said in 2026 that it had spent about a tenth of the Gates Foundation's budget in 2025 and more than twice that so far in 2026; Semafor reported it was on track to give away 2 billion dollars in the year and called it "a favorite of Anthropic executives."¹²

Origins

The organization grew out of GiveWell, the charity evaluator Holden Karnofsky cofounded with Elie Hassenfeld, and Good Ventures, the foundation Moskovitz and Tuna established in 2011. The two joined to form the Open Philanthropy Project in 2014, which began independent operations in 2017. Tuna is a former Wall Street Journal reporter.³⁴ Good Ventures supplies nearly all of its grant money; as Coefficient Giving it began advising outside donors, and it directed more than 100 million dollars of other donors' money in 2024.²

AI Grantmaking

In March 2017 Open Philanthropy recommended 30 million dollars over three years to OpenAI, under which Karnofsky joined OpenAI's board to oversee, "jointly with one other Board member," its safety and governance work. The grant page disclosed that the OpenAI researchers Dario Amodei and Paul Christiano were technical advisers to Open Philanthropy and lived in the same house as Karnofsky, who was engaged to Amodei's sister Daniela.⁵ In 2016 Sam Altman had led a 50-million-dollar investment in Asana, and Adam D'Angelo sat on the boards of both Asana and OpenAI.⁶ Moskovitz personally took part in the 124-million-dollar 2021 investment round of Anthropic. The Open Philanthropy program officer Luke Muehlhauser was one of Anthropic's four board members in 2023, and Karnofsky, Open Philanthropy's former chief executive and in 2023 its director of AI strategy, is married to Anthropic's president, Daniela Amodei. Moskovitz told Politico that any returns from his Anthropic investment "will be entirely redirected back into our philanthropic work."⁶ In 2026 Berger said: "We're definitely not the Anthropic Foundation."¹

Muehlhauser was the grant investigator on the 55-million-dollar grant of January 2019 that launched the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University under the former IARPA director Jason Matheny; Open Philanthropy was CSET's "main funder" and raised its commitment to more than 100 million dollars through 2025.⁷ After Matheny became chief executive of the RAND Corporation, Open Philanthropy gave RAND 5.5 million dollars in April 2023 and 10.5 million in October 2023 "to be spent at the discretion of RAND president and CEO Jason Matheny."⁸ It gave 5.16 million dollars to the Center for AI Safety in November 2022; the center organized the May 2023 statement that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority."⁶⁹ In November 2025 it gave 36 million dollars to Redwood Research, which OpenAI brought in to analyze an AI-agent attack on Hugging Face in July 2026.¹

Congress and the Press

In 2022 Open Philanthropy set aside nearly 3 million dollars for what became the first cohort of the Horizon Institute for Public Service, which pays technology fellows placed in congressional offices, federal agencies and think tanks; the Politico reporter Brendan Bordelon wrote in October 2023 that Open Philanthropy had "effectively created" Horizon. A spokesperson, Mike Levine, said Open Philanthropy "did not play an active role in screening, training, or placement of fellows" and that "the idea that we, our funders, or our grantees are motivated by pecuniary interests is misguided."⁶ By 2025 Coefficient Giving supplied the majority of the funding of the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, which places paid fellows in newsrooms and publishes the newsletter Transformer.¹⁰ In December 2025 Semafor reported that Open Philanthropy had been "bothered by media coverage of it, in particular a series of critical stories from Politico," and had hired political communications staff; its director of communications, Naina Bajekal, was a former executive editor of Time, which had hosted four Tarbell fellows.¹¹

Leadership

Karnofsky led Open Philanthropy as chief executive until June 16, 2021, when he announced that the cofounder Alexander Berger had been "promoted to co-CEO" in "a dual-CEO structure, with both of us reporting directly to the board," Karnofsky keeping biosecurity and AI risk and Berger taking the portfolio renamed "Global Health and Wellbeing."¹² On July 27, 2023, Karnofsky announced "on behalf of Open Philanthropy's board" that Berger was sole chief executive and that his own title was changing to director of AI strategy; Tuna, styled in the announcement as president, said that "Dustin and I have worked closely with Alexander for many years," and Berger recalled the time "when Holden, Cari, Dustin and I were starting to think about it together."¹³ Karnofsky left the staff on April 29, 2024, for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing that the organization "would benefit from less ambiguity about my role in its funding decisions (especially given the fact that I'm married to the President of a major AI company)," and that he would remain on its board "at least for the time being."¹⁴ The same officers ran the Open Philanthropy Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) whose returns list Karnofsky and Berger as co-CEOs for 2021 and 2022 and "co-CEO thru 7/23/23" for 2023.¹⁵

Redwood Research

Redwood Research, a Berkeley AI-alignment nonprofit, announced in October 2021 that its board was Nate Thomas, Paul Christiano and Karnofsky; its returns list Karnofsky as treasurer for 2021 and treasurer and CFO for 2022, and as a director until November 2023.¹⁶ Open Philanthropy recommended four grants totaling 9.42 million dollars to Redwood in November 2021, with Nick Beckstead as grant investigator, then 10.7 million dollars in August 2022, 5.3 million in June 2023 and 1.1 million in May 2025, before the 36 million dollars of November 2025, a total of 62.52 million dollars. None of the four archived grant pages mentions Karnofsky's or Christiano's board seats. Open Philanthropy's senior program officer for AI risk, Ajeya Cotra, was a Redwood director on its return for 2023 and until August 2024.¹⁶¹⁷

ARC and Canary

Open Philanthropy gave the Alignment Research Center, founded by Paul Christiano, 265,000 dollars for general support in March 2022 and 1,250,000 dollars over two years in November 2022. The center incubated ARC Evals, which spun off in December 2023 as METR.¹⁸¹⁹²⁰ In September 2025 Open Philanthropy gave the RAND Corporation 10 million dollars over three years for Canary, "a collaboration between RAND and METR to develop advanced methods for evaluating AI systems," on the recommendation of Trevor Levin of its AI governance and policy team.²¹