Tarbell Center for AI Journalism

The Tarbell Center for AI Journalism was launched in 2022 and funds work by early-career technology journalists, in its words to help society "navigate the emergence of increasingly advanced AI."¹ Its ethics policy of 2026 covers "all Tarbell staff, fellows, and grantees, including our in-house publication Transformer," and states: "As of 2025, the majority of our funding originates with a single funder, Coefficient Giving (formerly known as Open Philanthropy)." Donors, it says, "have no role in reviewing, vetting, or approving our staff, fellows, or grantees," and fellows must disclose their Tarbell association on their author pages. Tarbell staff may not own individual shares of companies that develop or deploy advanced AI.²

Placements

In December 2025 the Semafor media reporter Max Tani wrote that Time had had four Tarbell fellows on staff, that fellows had worked at Bloomberg, The Verge, the Los Angeles Times and The Information, and that Semafor itself had briefly had a fellow before ending the arrangement "after several weeks without publishing any of their work." Coefficient Giving's director of communications, Naina Bajekal, was a former executive editor of Time.¹

The NBC Disclosure

In late 2025 NBC News reported that OpenAI had issued legal threats against nonprofits that had criticized it. According to Semafor, OpenAI privately complained to NBC that the author had been paid by Tarbell and that Tarbell was funded in part by the Future of Life Institute, one of the groups in the story; NBC appended a disclosure. OpenAI declined to comment to Semafor. Tarbell's executive director, Cillian Crosson, said: "It's telling that OpenAI is attempting to discredit independent reporting instead of addressing the factual findings of that reporting." Bajekal said Coefficient Giving had "no involvement in coverage decisions." Tani also noted a critical piece on the fellowship in the Washington Examiner.¹

Transformer and Brian Chau

On May 23, 2024, Transformer, edited by Shakeel Hashim, published an article stating that Brian Chau, founder of the AI think tank Alliance for the Future, "has a history of expressing racist and sexist remarks," quoting his posts about George Floyd and about Harvard's president, and his praise of the podcast guests Curtis Yarvin and Richard Hanania. Chau did not respond to the article's request for comment. Alliance for the Future was then campaigning against California's AI bill SB 1047.³

On September 2, 2026, Effort, a publication founded by Chau, published an unsigned investigation titled "How Effective Altruism Bought the Media." It stated that all six participants in a Guardian article on the forecast "AI 2027," including the journalist and the publisher, were paid by three donors: Coefficient Giving, Jaan Tallinn's Survival and Flourishing Fund and Effective Ventures. It wrote that Coefficient paid the journalist's salary through the Tarbell Fellowship and had given the Guardian more than 3 million dollars, that "Coefficient pays the salaries of two dozen journalists at major news outlets," and that "58/100" of the Time 100 profiles were written by Tarbell-paid journalists. It also tabulated grants from Open Philanthropy, EA Funds, the Future of Life Institute, the Long-Term Future Fund and the Center for AI Safety to YouTube channels, among them Rational Animations and Robert Miles AI Safety.⁴⁵ Chau promoted it the same day on X: "BREAKING: AI Doomers Are Buying Potemkin Articles."⁶

Funding

The fellowship began as a project of Training for Good, to which Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of 575,000 dollars in September 2023 "to support the Tarbell Fellowship, a one-year program for early-career journalists interested in covering emerging technologies (especially artificial intelligence)," including general operating support and an extension for a current fellow. Open Philanthropy then gave the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism 816,000 dollars in general support in November 2024, noting that this "follows our September 2023 support for the Tarbell Fellowship (the project which later became Tarbell)," and 2,888,000 dollars for operating costs in August 2025, the three grants totalling 4,279,000 dollars. The first two grants were filed under Open Philanthropy's focus area "Navigating Transformative AI" and the third under "Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building."⁷⁸⁹

In November 2025 the Washington Examiner reporter Robert Schmad listed Tarbell's funders as Open Philanthropy, the EA Infrastructure Fund, the Future of Life Institute and the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and reported that Tarbell disclosed receiving between 100,000 and 1 million dollars each from the Future of Life Institute, which is itself funded by Open Philanthropy, and from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, one of whose co-founders, Andrew Critch, posts about AI risk and grant opportunities on the main effective altruism forum. The Future of Life Institute's donation did not appear on its most recent tax filing, which covered activities through the end of 2023. The fellowship grew from seven fellows in 2024 to sixteen in 2025, placed at Bloomberg, Time, The Information, The Guardian, NBC News, The Verge and the Los Angeles Times; NBC News took on its fellow in September 2025, a month before announcing large layoffs. Crosson told the paper: "The Tarbell Center maintains strict editorial independence from all funders and donors... Our fellows and their host newsrooms maintain complete autonomy from Tarbell, and we're proud of the role we play in supporting independent journalism from a wide range of perspectives."¹⁰

Will Henshall, a Tarbell fellow placed at Time in 2023 and 2024, joined Coefficient Giving, as Open Philanthropy was later renamed, as a program officer for AI governance and policy in July 2024.¹¹¹²