· Public charity
Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative
To improve human civilizations long-term prospects for survival and flourishing.
What you funded, over time
Every grant placed by its stated purpose and the recipient’s mission, by year — across FY2018–2024.
Where the money goes
Your grants by size, and where they go.
The 5 grants below total $2,062,055 — the rows itemised in this filing. The $2,541,655 headline is the total grant expense reported on the return, so the remaining $479,600 is giving the schedule does not break out: grants under the $5,000 itemisation floor, grants to individuals, and grants reported on other schedules. Every figure below describes the itemised rows only.
By grant size · FY2024
- $10k–50k2 grants · $41k
- $250k+3 grants · $2.0M
| Recipient | Amount |
|---|---|
| MATS RESEARCH INC | $1,521,400 |
| STANFORD UNIVERSITY | $250,000 |
| INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR SAFE & ETHICAL AI | $250,000 |
| SECUREBIO INC | $24,655 |
| RETHINK PRIORITIES (FISCAL SPONSOR OF APOLLO RESEARCH) | $16,000 |
Do your dollars go where the need is?
Each grant placed by the hardship in its grantee’s ZIP, then read against the area’s typical level.
Your human-services grants (FY24–24, $16k) land where the poverty rate runs at 10%, against an area that typically sits at 9%. 100% of those dollars go to grantees based in above-average-need neighborhoods. Most of your grants land in higher-need ZIPs.
Matched: human-services grants are those whose grantee’s IRS cause code is Human Services. Placed by people below the poverty linein the grantee’s ZIP, averaged from the tracts in that ZIP; grantee ZIP can differ from where services are delivered.
Grants abroad, by region — $286k on the FY2024 return
Schedule F, as filed: 5 regions, $220k to organizations and $66k to individuals. The IRS asks for region and purpose, not the recipient, so no country or grantee can be named here.
Stated purpose: GRANT AI SAFETY SOLUTIONS
Stated purpose: PRIZES
Stated purpose: PRIZES
Stated purpose: PRIZES
Stated purpose: PRIZES
US grants placed by each grantee’s ZIP, which can differ from where services are actually delivered. Need from public data — U.S. Census/ACS, CDC PLACES, Eviction Lab, USDA — shown as context about the area, never attributed to your giving. Grants abroad on Schedule F are filed by region, purpose and amount with no recipient name, so they are shown by region and cannot be placed on the country map or matched to a grantee.
Who you back again
Which organizations you funded more than once, and which you funded a single time. Each grantee is matched to its own filings.
And the relationships you keep tend to grow: grantees you re-up on have seen median revenue of +181% since the first grant, against +48% for the ones you funded once.
3 repeat relationships — 0 still active in FY2024, 3 since wound down; 4 grantees were first funded in FY2024 (too recent to call).
How the two cohorts compare
Organizations
Total granted
Median revenue growth · since first grant
Still filing today
New vs renewed · share of each year
In FY2024, 0% of grant dollars renewed an existing relationship; $1.8M went to new ones.
Where new relationships form · theme of each grantee’s first grant
First-time = a grantee’s first year in your filing window; renewed = funded in an earlier year too. As a portfolio matures the renewed share naturally climbs — once funded, an org stays “renewable” — so the signal is the years that buck it (a new-grantee intake wave). The earliest year is left-censored: relationships that predate the data read as “new.” Theme is the grantee’s IRS cause.
Backed again, and grew
- CFCENTER FOR APPLIED RATIONALITY3× · 2018–2022 · $1.7M · revenue +64% · 35% of their budget
- SASOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENTREPRENEURS (SEE) INC4× · 2019–2022 · $1.0M · revenue +345%
- EVEFFECTIVE VENTURES FOUNDATION USA INC2× · 2019–2023 · $56k · revenue +181%
Funded once
- UOUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY FOUNDATIONgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $400k · revenue +99%
- MIMACHINE INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH INSTITUTE INCone grant, 2020 · $300k · revenue -80%
- FOFUTURE OF LIFE INSTITUTEgraduatedone grant, 2018 · $300k · revenue +682%
Repeat = funded in two or more distinct years; growth and survival are read from each grantee’s own subsequent IRS filings.
The map has a center of gravity: the average direction from the rest of the sector toward the organizations the foundation funds — the shape of its giving. Scoring every nonprofit along that direction surfaces the ones that look most like the portfolio. These are the closest matchesthat aren’t grantees — a resemblance in what they say they do, not a recommendation.
To drive global coordination that minimizes extreme AI risks and ensures the benefits of AI are shared by all. SAIF fosters responsible governance to reduce catastrophic risks through shared understanding and collaboration among key global…
to reduce societal-scale risks associated with artificial intelligence AI by advancing safety research, building the field of AI safety researchers, and promoting safety standards.
Transluce is an independent research lab that builds open, scalable technology for understanding ai systems and steering them in the public interest.
Our mission is to research and communicate the capabilities and risks posed by advanced artificial intelligence systems. our current work focuses on cybersecurity, deception, and persuasion. we aim to communicate the state of these…
Perform basic research and preclinical efficacy assessments of new molecular entities being developed for the prevention and treatment of cancer and infectious disease. Discover new pathways and targets for the design and development of…
Our mission is to advance research on interpretability and alignment of foundation models and to educate about the capabilities, limitations, and risks associated with these technologies.
Our mission is to build an ai scientist, or ai systems, that can automate scientific research and accelerate the pace of discovery, so humanity can find cures for disease, solutions for climate change, and other species-accelerating…
Speculative technologies is a nonprofit research organization that runs coordinated research programs to unlock big-if-true technologies that are too speculative to be a startup but are too coordination- or engineering-heavy for academia…
The organization provides public education on artificial intelligence.
OpenAIs mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
Our mission is to accelerate scientific progress, understand the root causes of disease, and narrow the gap between discoveries and impact on patients.
Scientific research in information processing; fostering dev. of nat'l inf. infra.
For reference, the grantee most central to the portfolio’s shape is Machine Intelligence Research Institute Inc and the most unlike its peers is Institute for Philosophical Research. Resemblance is measured on each organization’s own IRS 990 mission text; it reflects how work is described, not its quality or impact.
18 grantees tracked through their own filings, 2017–2025.
Each one resolved to its own IRS returns and tracked year by year — your grant beside their revenue from every source. Association, dated; never a causal claim.
Counted here: distinct organizations you funded across 2017–2025, not grant rows in a single year — so this will not match the grant count on the cover. 18 of the 19 grantees resolved in that span have returns of their own we could reconcile; the rest are funded organizations whose filings we could not track year by year.
Where your money sits — by cause, then by grantee
Each org by its size and your share of it — top-left is where you’re load-bearing
Go grantee by grantee — a decade per org, and how each moved after you funded them
A decade per grantee — revenue shaded, your grants as bars, all rows on one timeline.
- Who funds Silicon Valley Community Foundation ↗
- Who funds CENTER FOR APPLIED RATIONALITY ↗
- Who funds MATS RESEARCH INC ↗
- Who funds SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENTREPRENEURS (SEE) INC ↗
- Who funds UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY FOUNDATION ↗
- Who funds MACHINE INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH INSTITUTE INC ↗
- Who funds FUTURE OF LIFE INSTITUTE ↗
- Who funds THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY ↗
- Who funds INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR SAFE AND ETHICAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE INC ↗
- Who funds EFFECTIVE VENTURES FOUNDATION USA INC ↗
- Who funds THEISS RESEARCH ↗
- Who funds INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCH ↗
- Who funds CONVERGENCE ANALYSIS ↗
- Who funds Association for the Advancement of Artificial Inte ↗
- Who funds LEVERAGE RESEARCH INC ↗
- Who funds SECUREBIO INC ↗
- Who funds Rethink Priorities ↗
- Who funds Quantified Uncertainty Research Inst ↗
The grantmakers whose grantees overlap with yours far more than size alone predicts. Each orbits closer the stronger the alignment; the arcs between them show where they also fund each other. Here it reads as a tightly interlocked camp — most of these funders back each other's grantees too.
Open a dossier: Founders Pledge Inc · Silicon Valley Community Foundation · Good Ventures Foundation · Rethink Charity · Beri Support Fund · Effective Ventures Foundation USA Inc · Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program · Network for Good · Paypal Charitable Giving Fund · National Philanthropic Trust · American Online Giving Foundation Inc · Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund
Affinity is a Gamma-Poisson posterior co-funding rate, re-centered on the typical rate, so thin evidence shrinks toward no signal. A research starting point: overlap is association, not proof of shared intent.
Government reliance of your grantees
Every dot is one organization Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative funds. Left–right is the share of its income from government; up–down is the share from you. Bigger dots raise more. Filter to federal or a single department — and drag the year to watch it move.
Government income is each org’s traced federal awards (USASpending — grants and contracts) plus state payments (open checkbooks) as a share of its total revenue (IRS Form 990); the self-reported government-grant line (990 line 1e) is carried for cross-check: a grantee that reports government grants we could not trace to a source is left off the chart rather than shown as receiving none. An association, not a claim that your grant caused the public funding. Coverage is precision-first — a floor, not a census; state records exist for 9 states, so a grantee outside them shows no state figure (dimmed) rather than a false zero. Federal award amounts are obligations, which can span years, so a single-year share is indicative. 990 filings lag 12–24 months.