Rethink Priorities: 2025 Results, 2026 Plans and Funding Needs

By Rethink Priorities, Marcus_A_Davis, kierangreig🔸, Janique, rickardvikstrom @ 2025-11-18T11:27 (+45)

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When Peter Wildeford and I, Marcus A. Davis, founded Rethink Priorities (RP) in 2018, we saw a gap in the charity landscape: too few organizations were providing the rigorous comparative analysis needed to allocate resources optimally. Seven years later, thanks to the trust and support of this community, RP has become one of the few research organizations pioneering work in areas that didn't exist as distinct fields when we began.

Since our early days, RP has grown into a think-and-do tank that combines careful analysis with practical action to make progress on global priorities. We think our comparative advantage lies in working upstream, and so aim to contribute where rigorous thinking and early, well-informed decisions can make a meaningful difference. 

We've adopted a cross-cause perspective because we believe understanding trade-offs and connections between areas like animal welfare, global health, and longtermist priorities is important for long-term impact. By helping funders assess opportunities across causes using transparent, evidence-based frameworks, we hope to support better resource allocation. And when we identify emerging areas like digital consciousness or invertebrate welfare before they're crowded, we can influence trajectories while fields are still being shaped.


Thanks to this approach, we delivered the following 2025 outcomes for funders and partners:

  • Directly advised major philanthropic funders
    • Our research in global health and development supported some of the biggest philanthropic funders, whose program budgets total hundreds of millions of dollars.
  • Helped funders address the US foreign aid cuts
    • Our donor guide on how to allocate funds amid US foreign aid cuts was cited in major media, including the Associated Press, helping donors channel resources where they’re needed most.
  • Expanded our philanthropic tools to enable better resource allocation
    • We released updates to the Moral Parliament tool, enabling philanthropists and policymakers to compare trade-offs across healthcare resources, global health charities, animal species, and movement-building strategies.
  • Coordinated dozens of animal advocacy organizations on strategic priorities
    • We convened leading organizations to align on welfare strategies for the most neglected animals (including fish and invertebrates) and enabled major funders to more confidently deploy almost $10M in grants toward EU farmed animal welfare advocacy.
  • Created a framework to guide the emerging field of digital minds
    • New York University’s Center for Minds, Ethics, and Policy (CMEP) hosted a workshop on our behalf, with experts from major AI labs, academia, and research nonprofits, to inform our forthcoming Digital Consciousness Model.
  • Accelerated crucial infrastructure to address AI risks
    • Through our Special Projects program, we provided administrative and strategic support to nine early-stage, high-potential initiatives (such as Apollo Research, Truthful AI, the Institute for AI Policy & Strategy, and Consultants for Impact). Our support helped these organizations scale core work on AI safety and talent pipelines for global catastrophic risk reduction.

With that context, this 2025 results & 2026 priorities update summarizes what we achieved in 2025, what we learned, and how additional support can drive outsized impact in 2026.

Our 2026 core budget,[1] assuming no growth, is $7.5 million.[2] However, we believe that we can productively use at least $9.3 million to scale high-leverage opportunities such as our new AI Strategy team, our upcoming AI cognition and digital minds work, as well as cross-cause prioritization work.

We especially value unrestricted support, as it gives us the flexibility to strengthen our core operations and respond quickly to new opportunities. While most of our funding is tied to specific projects or causes, flexible support allows us to pursue important, time-sensitive work that might not otherwise receive dedicated funding.

We expect 2026 to be an important year for our work, as many new major donors are likely to begin exploring effective giving. With sufficient unrestricted support, RP can help these funders make informed decisions by providing rigorous analysis on cause and intervention prioritization. We are preparing a number of research projects for early 2026 aimed at identifying and comparing promising opportunities across areas such as animal welfare, global health, and longtermist priorities. Additional flexible funding would make it possible for us to deliver this work at the necessary scale and speed, helping ensure that new resources are directed toward the most impactful opportunities.

Get in touch. I'm always happy to discuss Rethink Priorities' work, answer questions about our research, or explore potential collaborations. You can also sign up for personalized donation advice (a new service we're piloting this quarter to help funders and partners apply RP's insights) or reach out directly to me or the team.

This is a pivotal moment for us, and your donations to RP's greatest needs or to the cause area of your choice will be highly appreciated. 

Thank you for supporting us!
Marcus A. Davis,
CEO of Rethink Priorities


Rethink Priorities 2025 results  

This section details our 2025 results. Because Rethink Priorities is a meta organization—we influence change through other organizations rather than working directly with beneficiaries—we report primarily on outputs (what we produced) and outcomes (their immediate effects). Since measuring our ultimate impact can be complex, we’re developing an evaluation system to better track our work’s downstream effects and plan to present the results in 2026.
 

1) In 2025, Rethink Priorities made progress across several emerging and complex areas of research: 

a)  The Worldview Investigations team developed a Digital Consciousness Model, an early framework that brings together different theories of consciousness to assess the potential moral relevance of AI systems, and produced the first systematic estimate of possible digital minds by 2050, contributing to a better understanding of how artificial sentience might affect moral and policy decisions. The team also created new models of movement-building dynamics that are now being used by the Centre for Effective Altruism to inform local group strategy and strengthen community-level decision-making.

b) At the same time, RP’s applied research and coordination work supported progress across animal and human-focused domains. 

Together, these projects provided practical insights and stronger empirical foundations to guide funders, advocates, and researchers working to improve decision-making across cause areas.
 

2) Our 2025 outputs included[3]: 

3) Our key partnerships in 2025 included (among others):

Learn more about our progress across departments in the dedicated sections below. 


Challenges and learnings

Staying aligned with what matters most—both in terms of overall priorities and the specific needs of decision-makers—remains challenging. In 2025, some projects took longer than expected due to capacity constraints. We navigated several leadership transitions, including Marcus A. Davis completing his first full year as sole CEO, the permanent appointment of Carolyn Footitt as COO, and managing a few extended leaves of absence. The upcoming spin-out of the Institute for AI Policy & Strategy (IAPS), along with evolving US compliance requirements, has placed additional demands on our operations. We were also reminded that even rigorous research has limited influence without strategic outreach and the right partnerships.

At the same time, certain collaborations proved their value. Our research partnerships with major foundations in global health and development are progressing well, and we are actively seeking new opportunities to inform programs of impact-focused foundations. We invested significantly in communications infrastructure—launching Substack publications, organizing webinars on emerging topics such as shrimp welfare, and developing materials that strengthen connections with key organizations. This year clarified where RP can add the most value and informed how we will structure our teams and plan our work for 2026.

 

We're grateful for the trust our funders, partners, and collaborators place in us, and we treat that trust as an ongoing obligation to convert resources into demonstrable, counterfactual impact. In 2026, we'll meet that obligation in two concrete ways. First, we'll expand high-leverage work across our programs while making its effects more legible through systematic impact accounts. Second, we'll increase transparency by publishing open methods and discussing limitations and null results candidly. The goal is straightforward: to show ourselves and our supporters where the next marginal dollar to RP does the most good.

Our plans for 2026

The world is changing quickly, and the choices we make today may shape the lives of people, animals, and future generations for years to come. With your support, RP is uniquely positioned to help shape these decisions in ways that maximize impact. Below are the outcomes we’re prioritizing in 2026 to help shift resources, decisions, and strategies toward the greatest impact for humans and animals:

  • Redirect large pools of philanthropic capital toward high-impact opportunities
    • Influence the allocation of hundreds of millions across animal welfare, global health, and longtermist priorities, steering funds toward the most cost-effective, tractable interventions.
  • Build the near-term intervention landscape to protect billions of animals
    • Develop and scale evidence-based welfare improvements for farmed animals, fish, insects, shrimp, and wild animals—advancing cost-effective interventions to reduce suffering across farms and environments.
  • Advance tools for better decision-making under uncertainty
    • Equip funders and policymakers with frameworks, empirical work, and advising on moral weights, digital sentience, and cross-cause cost-effectiveness, so they can navigate deep moral and empirical uncertainty with greater clarity.
  • Support a new generation of organizations that can scale quickly to meet emerging challenges.
    • Through the Special Projects program and targeted fiscal sponsorships, help start or grow organizations that fill critical ecosystem gaps.
  • Expand the reach and uptake of our work
    • Create and disseminate communications products that bridge evidence and action, reaching policymakers, foundations, and sector leaders with accessible, compelling takeaways.
  • Build strong evaluation systems
    • Develop robust impact evaluation frameworks across departments, ensuring we can systematically track, quantify, and assess the outcomes of our work, as well as its counterfactual impact, making our contributions more visible and verifiable.


Further key programmatic priorities by department include:

More details in the department-specific sections below. 


We are also advancing three new initiatives within the RP ecosystem:

Our funding needs and how you can help

Our 2026 core budget,[5] assuming no growth, is $7.5 million.[6] However, we believe that we can productively use at least $9.3 million to scale high-leverage opportunities. While we have many pending funding requests and are actively pursuing new resources, the following table provides a snapshot of our financial position with respect to restricted assets, expenses, and room for more funding.

Area [7]Current assets (as of Sep 30, 2025) [8]2025 Estimated expenses

Estimated room for more funding through year-end 2026 [9]

 

Global Health & Development

$1,265,000

$1,035,000

$1,785,000

Animal Welfare

$1,405,000

$1,595,000

$2,185,000

Worldview Investigations

$445,000

$825,000

$2,000,000

Surveys and Data Analysis

$220,000

$355,000

$305,000

AI Strategy 

$15,000 

$25,000

$525,000

Core Operations [10]

$1,590,000

$1,915,000

$2,500,000

Total

$4,940,000

$5,750,000

$9,300,000


How unrestricted funding unlocks efficiencies and creates catalytic impact

Most of our funding is understandably tied to specific projects or cause areas, and we deeply value that support. But flexible funding often accomplishes what restricted dollars cannot: it strengthens our operational backbone, enabling the entire organization to run more efficiently, and allows us to act quickly on neglected or time-sensitive opportunities.

Several of our most influential lines of work began this way—for example, the Moral Weight Project, our early work on digital consciousness, and improvements to our digital tools for philanthropic decision-making.

To illustrate the impact this can have, here is how different levels of unrestricted funding would likely be deployed in 2026:
 


Fund a cause area or project that aligns with your priorities

For donors who prefer to support a particular field, general gifts to each department sustain core teams and fund top-priority projects. Please find overviews of how each of our departments would deploy more funding and learn more about these and other projects/initiatives in the department-specific sections of this post:

Multiple ways to give and connect with us

DONATE NOW

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out to our development team for more tailored support: 

Whitney Childs - Global Health and Development
Hannah Tookey - Animal Welfare
Janique Behman - Worldview Investigations, Surveys and Data Analysis
Kieran Greig - wider organizational strategy and plans
develoment@rethinkpriorities.org - for general inquiries, technical questions 
 

Results and priorities in the different areas of our work 

Worldview Investigations

Strategy

Figuring out how to do good requires grappling with a variety of normative and empirical uncertainties. Yet work on these cross-cutting questions is highly neglected. Our Worldview Investigations team brings together philosophers and empiricists to combine theoretical rigor with explicit quantitative modeling to address key questions about how to do the most good.

This work involves addressing:

By addressing these questions, we aim to provide decision-makers with clear, actionable information to optimize their resource allocation strategies. We also hope to influence the movement as a whole by:


Achievements in 2025

Thanks to grants from foundations and support from individuals, we: 

Our researchers have also published in leading academic journals such as Ethics and the Journal of Consciousness Studies (forthcoming).

Plans for 2026

Cross-cause prioritization

Given the changing philanthropic landscape, the potential influx of new funders interested in high-impact opportunities, and our comparative advantage as one of the last organizations focused on cross-cause impact, we’d like to ambitiously scale our cross-cause prioritization work, including:

Step 1: Systematically identifying key cruxes for how to best allocate resources:

Step 2: With this map of key considerations in place, we propose conducting targeted work strategically focused on the cruxes that matter most for decision-making and where our research can make the biggest difference.

Step 3: Building on this analysis, we aim to offer direct recommendations on what RP researchers believe is the optimal allocation of resources, highlighting key ongoing uncertainties.

We also plan to dedicate more time to making our work accessible to donors. This will include translating our tools and models into user-friendly forms, as well as allocating more time to advisory services provided to medium and large cause-neutral donors who want to optimize their giving portfolios with evidence-based tools. 


New AI Cognition Initiative

In 2026, we are pursuing synergistic plans to better understand digital minds and AI cognition:

Funding needs for 2026

The Worldview Investigations team is currently constrained in capacity and has significant room for additional funding to support growth across our areas. By 2026, we believe we can productively utilize up to $2 million to increase our bandwidth. As we work across various areas, your donations can directly influence the extent to which we focus on each of them (e.g., AI, digital welfare, cross-cause prioritization, and animal welfare).

Examples of what we would use additional funding for:


$825K to scale our work on cross-cause prioritization

Cross-cause prioritization work is highly neglected within EA, with few funders supporting this area. $825K would enable us to build the capacity to rigorously examine the highest-priority cruxes that determine where marginal dollars have the most impact. With millions of new philanthropic dollars expected to enter the effective giving space, this work can be crucial for helping funders make more informed, high-level allocation decisions.


$130K for understanding policy and social implications of digital consciousness

If AI systems achieve morally relevant consciousness, how should society respond to this development? This work tackles the foundational questions that legislators, tech companies, and international bodies will soon face: whether digital minds warrant individual rights (like humans), welfare protections (like animals), or entirely new legal frameworks—and what each approach would mean in practice.

Feel free to contact us for more detailed research plans in the different areas of our work.

Support our work to improve cause prioritization and our understanding of AI cognition and digital minds. 

Donate to Worldview Investigations


Global Health and Development

Strategy

Our Global Health and Development (GHD) team delivers rigorous, evidence-based analysis to major funders and implementers. Working at the intersection of research and strategy, we translate complex evidence into actionable insights to redirect resources toward the highest-impact opportunities.

Over the past year, we pursued impact through three approaches:

  1. Research and advisory services for major grantmakers: Commissioned projects for established funders—such as the Gates Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and Open Philanthropy—helping in programmatic decision-making or optimizing resource allocations across portfolios.
  2. Independent research on frontier questions: Conducted original analysis on time-sensitive work that had significant impact potential.
  3. Capacity-building for implementing organizations: Partnered with select service-delivery organizations to conduct rigorous cost-effectiveness analyses and program evaluations, strengthening program design and equipping partners with the evidence needed to attract additional funding.

Achievements in 2025

Strategic partnerships with major funders

Given that GHD program portfolios range into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year, even marginal shifts have the potential for an outsized impact. In 2025, we primarily operated as a research consultancy, delivering evidence-based analysis and decision support to leading philanthropies seeking a higher return on impact. We completed 12 commissioned projects, including engagement with The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, examining reproductive health product access in East and Francophone West Africa. Our work also included two engagements with the Gates Foundation — one with their Data and Technology Adoption (DATA) team, developing a model to capture the economic and health benefits of education interventions for adolescent girls and young women in low- and middle-income countries. For the Women's Economic Empowerment (WEE) team, our team quantified the potential reach and cost-effectiveness of credit access expansion in East Africa. 

We also partnered with The Nature Conservancy Alaska to evaluate the feasibility of adapting Project Drawdown's systematic prioritization framework—which identifies the most effective climate solutions globally—to Alaska's unique context. Deliverables included a comprehensive evaluation framework and emissions impact model to guide their strategic decisions.

It was extremely valuable to have Rethink Priorities support with strategic planning for a new project. Their team created a framework to help us assess the impact of climate solutions in a cultural context that’s different from many of the spaces in which they typically work. As such, the project blended some of their core tools (weighted factor model, cost-effectiveness analysis) with a more qualitative approach tailored to our context, which was exactly what we needed. I was impressed at how quickly they got up to speed in this new area, and provided much-needed capacity for our small team. I look forward to using the report they produced as we build out this project.

- Jessie Barker, Alaska Climate Strategy Director, The Nature Conservancy

For D-Prize, an organization that seeds high-impact social ventures, we provided research to inform their venture challenge topics in maternal, neonatal, and child health. The analysis explored whether existing challenges in misoprostol distribution and immunization reminders remain cost-effective and scalable, identified promising interventions, including kangaroo care for preterm newborns, and designed a survey to test whether locally grounded writing improves engagement. These findings ultimately supported D-Prize’s most recent â€ścalls to action” in late 2025.

Finally, we continued our ongoing partnership with Open Philanthropy, including a follow-up report on health systems strengthening as a potential cause area, as well as research into how to improve data and estimates—such as census and burden figures—to better guide prioritization and decision-making.

Note: Following an editing and approval process with clients, many of our reports and engagements are published on the RP website several months after project completion. This means that our publicly visible output in any given year may not reflect all research completed that year—some of our most impactful 2025 work may not appear on our website until 2026.


Independent research

Following the January 2025 pause on foreign aid in the US, our team rapidly mobilized to secure funding to produce a strategic guide for donors and grantmakers navigating the implications of these cuts. The report provided an evidence-based framework for resource allocation and reached key decision-makers through EA-aligned networks. Coverage by the Associated Press further expanded our report's reach beyond the immediate EA ecosystem.  

We are also beginning work on a new project to assess the cost-effectiveness of top climate change mitigation interventions as compared to global health and development interventions. While this project was designed in partnership with an individual philanthropist, this research fills a gap for the broader philanthropic community.


EA ecosystem support

We partnered with EA-aligned direct-service organizations such as Lafiya Nigeria and Family Empowerment Media to deliver cost-effectiveness models and strategic analyses that informed the direction of programs and near-term decisions. To expand this type of support to more partners and reduce costs, we plan to launch the Research Subsidy Fund for high-quality research and evaluation work (more details below in the plans section).

Family Empowerment Media (FEM) worked with Rethink Priorities to review our analysis of a potential area of work. Their input directly impacted our decision, helping ensure FEM remains as cost-effective and impactful as possible.

- Anna Christina Thorsheim, Executive Director & Co-founder, Family Empowerment Media

 

Challenges in 2025

Independent research funding

High demand for commissioned work limited our capacity for independent research in 2025. While commissioned projects fund themselves, they don't provide the flexible resources needed for exploratory work that can yield high-impact insights. Additional 2026 funding would allow us to pursue these opportunities alongside our client work.

Capacity constrains

When high demand for our services exceeded immediate capacity, we responded by rapidly launching a hiring round, which ended with us successfully hiring three new researchers who will help us scale and accelerate our delivery.

 

Plans for 2026 and funding opportunities

The following outlines our most urgent funding needs and plans for 2026:
 

1. Unrestricted funding: ~$1.035 million to sustain current capacity | Open Philanthropy will match donations up to $400K[11] 

Our 2026 budget is approximately $1.035 million to support a team of eight. Unrestricted support is essential to maintain current operations and ensure we can respond to time-sensitive opportunities that fall outside commissioned work, and allocate researcher time where it can have the greatest marginal impact.

Through 2027, all unrestricted donations will be matched 1:1 by Open Philanthropy, up to $400K. In 2025, we secured approximately $100K in eligible revenue, with a further $150k pledged. With your help for 2026, we aim to raise at least $150K to continue leveraging this impactful and time-sensitive opportunity.

If giving exceeds the current budget target, we will prioritize expanding capacity through new research hires and strengthened partnership development, enhancing our ability to identify and pursue high-impact collaborations.
 

2. Independent Research: Donation opportunities with various scopes and costs

We currently spend approximately 5–10% of our time conducting independent research; our goal for 2026 is to increase this to 20%.  

Independent research priorities are informed by the expertise of researchers, ongoing dialogue with partners, and gaps identified in the global health and development evidence base. In 2026, potential areas of exploration include, in order of priority: 

Independent research projects typically last around 4 weeks and cost approximately $30K–$60K. Sample projects that you could fund include:

$50K to support the continuation of fungal diseases research: In previous research, the team projected that deaths and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) related to fungal disease could grow to approximately 2–3 times the current burden until 2040. Unfortunately, data on the global fungal disease burden is poor, and estimates are primarily based on extrapolations from a few available studies. The experts consulted agree that current burden estimates (usually stated as more than 1.7 million deaths/year) likely underestimate the true burden. Not knowing the true current burden can obscure the importance of the disease and limit the amount of resources allocated to fighting it. An extended version of this work could help narrow the uncertainty and calibrate expectations for the disease’s trajectory. Ultimately, informing global health organizations and funders if this issue warrants even more attention.

$60K to identify high-impact funding opportunities in mental health: Three rapid “research sprints” will generate fresh meta-analyses on (i) direct therapeutic interventions, (ii) neglected niches of mental health burden, and (iii) health or economic programs with large mental health spill-overs. Insights will be synthesized and shared with leading philanthropic funders, offering tailored follow-on support that can help them direct tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in future grants toward the most cost-effective mental health solutions.

Donors who prefer to direct funding toward specific projects can contact us to discuss the current independent research agenda in more detail. In particular, we have a range of exciting ideas for research on the implications of AI advances for GHD.


3. Research Subsidy Fund for EA ecosystem support: $100K

A common barrier for direct-implementation organizations is having a sufficient budget to conduct cost-effectiveness evaluations, impact assessments, and other advanced and crucial research services. In 2026, we aim to launch a Research Subsidy Fund to provide them at a reduced cost. While the formal program is still in development, donors interested in supporting this now can request that their funds be earmarked for this purpose (to be applied to projects already under consideration). We believe donor support for this initiative will lead to optimization of partner organizations’ program designs and faster delivery of evidence of impact and effectiveness, eliminating two common barriers to scaling high-impact solutions. 

Feel free to contact the team for more detailed research plans in each area. 

Support research that helps funders and implementers maximize their impact in global health.

Donate to Global Health and Development

 

Animal Welfare 

Strategy

Rethink Priorities aims to help alleviate animal suffering by maximizing the impact of funders, organizations, and policymakers in the animal advocacy space. We produce decision-relevant research and tools to inform organizational strategy and coordinate stakeholders toward shared goals. Where paths to impact do not yet exist, we build them by launching and supporting scalable interventions. Our work is structured around three core programmatic areas:


Achievements in 2025

In the past year, we: 

Challenges in 2025

In 2024, we had identified the challenge of ensuring that our research translates into practical advocacy and funding strategies. In response, we have increasingly designed projects in close collaboration with advocacy organizations, grounding our work in real-world needs. Recent examples include the development of new fish and shrimp welfare asks in close partnership with key stakeholders and coordinated strategy roadmaps. 

Additionally, like many growing organizations, we faced capacity constraints that limited how much work we could responsibly accept. Staff shortages and difficulties in finding suitable contractors for specialized sub-cause areas also slowed progress on a number of projects. To address these issues, we’re investing more in developing talent pipelines. Our first step, made possible by recently secured funding, will be the creation of a Neglected Animals Program Lead to oversee strategy and coordination across our farmed insects, shrimp, and wild animal welfare work. This role will help us move forward efficiently, expand our capacity, and scale our impact across these emerging areas.


Plans for 2026

Movement strategy
With farmed animal numbers projected to quadruple by 2033 and emerging risks like the integration of AI into factory farming, there is a growing need for strategic foresight and adaptive planning. We are beginning to address these challenges through work examining the impact of AI on aquaculture and plan to launch a broader horizon-scanning initiative on other emerging challenges. We will continue hosting coordination events and working with funders, advocates, and policymakers to identify pressing needs, address barriers, and develop practical solutions. 


Fish welfare
Building on our evidence-led European fish welfare strategy, we will focus on developing and preparing to pilot cost-effective interventions for salmon, seabass, and seabream. This includes hosting coordination forums, identifying the welfare improvements with the greatest potential impact across these species, and incubating new organizations where appropriate.


Neglected animals

Funding needs for 2026

To sustain our level of effort from 2025, we foresee a budget of roughly $1.6 million. With additional funding, we would hire full-time staff with experience in high-priority domain areas, enabling us to more quickly take advantage of opportunities that are less consistent with a generalist approach. We have room for more funding of up to $2.2 million. Below, we outline a few projects that we believe have high expected value and aren't already covered by existing or anticipated restricted funding. Feel free to get in touch if you're interested in other specific projects we are planning.


A contribution of any value to our Neglected Animals Project Fund

This fund enables us to act quickly when brief windows for impact arise, and helps prevent costly delays. This past year, due to dedicated funding, we were able to respond rapidly to a confidential opportunity to influence welfare policy guidelines, and we anticipate that similar policy opportunities will likely arise elsewhere as insect and shrimp farming industries expand. Potential uses include: conducting short-form research to scope new opportunities or address critical knowledge gaps; convening stakeholders to adapt strategy in response to external changes; supporting interested advocates to start welfare work for shrimp, insects, or wild animals, or rapidly scaling interventions to new industries or regions.


$100K for a Neglected Animals Talent Program

We are planning a pilot fellowship program to attract promising researchers to work on the most neglected areas of animal welfare—farmed invertebrates and wild animals. With approximately five fellows receiving stipends and mentorship from RP managers, this program would directly expand the talent pipeline in areas that currently lack sufficient capacity.

Fellows would contribute to ongoing high-impact research while building expertise for long-term careers in these emerging fields. We're particularly interested in candidates from underrepresented but populous regions who can bring diverse perspectives to these neglected issues.

This program will address a critical bottleneck: the shortage of skilled advocates positioned to advance invertebrate and wild animal welfare as these fields rapidly expand.


$75K to evaluate potential future trajectories for farmed animals

This horizon scanning and scenario planning project will explore key trends and uncertainties projected to impact farmed animals over the next 10–50 years. We will analyze technological, economic, and environmental shifts to identify various likely scenarios, point to plausible high-impact opportunities, and anticipate challenges. High-priority topics we’d likely cover: 

Outputs will include scenario reports, “IF-THEN” triggers, and prioritized strategic recommendations to help advocates and funders navigate uncertainty and take timely action on critical future risks and opportunities. The scope and depth of this work can be adapted depending on available funding. 


$40K to assess pain reduction for farmed animals

Reducing animals’ capacity to feel pain has been proposed as a potential way to massively lessen suffering in intensive animal farming systems. This project would rapidly review the state of the science for key species (e.g., chickens, fish, and shrimp), and help initially evaluate the technical feasibility and welfare impacts of developing low-pain breeds. The outcome will be a practical framework outlining next steps, further research, and how further investment in this area could be allocated. 


$30K to assess AI’s impacts on the viability of alternative proteins 

Advances in AI could meaningfully influence the development, cost, and adoption of alternative proteins, shaping whether and how quickly they can compete with conventional animal products at scale. This project will analyze where AI-driven improvements might remove key barriers to alternative protein industry growth. The goal is to provide funders and advocates with an early strategic understanding of how AI developments could either accelerate or largely fail to affect a potential transition toward alternative proteins.

Feel free to contact us for more detailed research plans, or with questions about our efforts in these or other areas. 

Support our work to improve animal welfare, particularly for the most neglected species.

Donate to Animal Welfare

 

Surveys and Data Analysis

Strategy

Many organizations working in high-impact cause areas lack the in-house capacity to quickly design, run, and analyze audience research that informs critical strategic decisions on program prioritization, targeting, and message framing. Our Surveys and Data Analysis team fills this gap by serving as an on-demand research arm. We conduct polls, surveys, experiments, and data analysis, then distill findings into decision-relevant guidance that helps leaders choose the right strategies—ensuring communications land effectively and resources move faster toward what works.

Our cause-neutral team enables us to deliver technical expertise across all high-impact cause areas. We specialize in conducting:

For the EA community specifically, we track public attitudes and community health, helping the movement and neighboring fields anticipate and mitigate reputational and strategic risks.

We also frequently provide pro bono support to individuals and smaller organizations—both within the EA community and beyond—to lower barriers to rigorous empirical work. 


Achievements in 2025

As in previous years, most of our projects have been private commissions and consultations for key high-impact organizations. Some select projects we can mention publicly include:

Funding needs for 2026


$355K for our core needs
This amount enables us to sustain our team and maintain our current delivery pace in supporting core high-impact initiatives.
 

$305K for new projects
We have room for up to $305K to fund additional high-leverage projects directly relevant to near-term decisions:

We also accept direct commissions for help with surveys, data analysis, statistical consultation, and impact analysis. Every year we additionally support a large number of orgs who have limited ability to pay for our services pro bono.

Feel free to contact us for more details about completed or upcoming work, as well as tailored funding opportunities.

Support our efforts to strengthen the movement of high-impact organizations, particularly those that cannot afford this important work on their own. 
 

Donate to Surveys and Data Analysis


AI Strategy 

Strategy

In 2026, we plan to launch a dedicated AI Strategy team focused on navigating the challenges posed by transformative AI. This team will generate high-leverage insights and decision-oriented research to inform critical policy and strategic choices, while piloting and incubating practical solutions that reduce catastrophic AI risk and help steer toward broadly beneficial outcomes.

Specifically, our initial approach will: 

This team will complement RP’s broader AI-related work. Our Worldview Investigations team explores foundational questions such as digital consciousness, varieties of technical AI research, and cross-cause modeling, while our Special Projects team helps promising initiatives get off the ground by providing operational and strategic support. The AI Strategy Team will build on these efforts by identifying important gaps in the AI safety and governance landscape, assessing where new interventions might be valuable, and where appropriate, helping others begin or scale work in those areas.


Plans for 2026

We will focus on four interlinked priorities:

1. Establishing the team

2. Building field-level strategic insight

3. Developing actionable, relevant guidance for stakeholders 

4. Incubating and supporting new strategic initiatives


Funding needs for 2026

Rethink Priorities seeks to fully establish the AI Strategy Team and sustain it through its first year of operation.


$270K for base funding


$525K to meet our full-scale funding goal

We are highly confident that funding at either level would be used effectively to reduce strategic uncertainty and accelerate coordination across the AI safety ecosystem.

Feel free to contact us with any questions or to learn how you can contribute. 


Special Projects 

Strategy

Rethink Priorities' Special Projects program accelerates impactful initiatives by providing comprehensive support services, including fiscal sponsorship, financial administration, recruitment, and operational support. Our goal is to help leaders of high-impact projects get off the ground quickly and focus on their core mission by providing the necessary infrastructure to run their programs and scale efficiently. Thanks to fees paid by the projects, this program is financially self-sustaining, though additional funding could be used in order to help expand the program.  


Special Projects 2025 in numbers 


Project impact highlights

Apollo Research 

Apollo Research is an AI safety lab that evaluates and mitigates advanced AI risks—such as scheming and deception—through model testing and technical research. In 2025 the team: 

Consultants for Impact

Consultants for Impact is a global community that helps current and former consultants transition into high-impact roles through advising, placements, and peer support. In 2025 the team: 

Global Challenges Project

Global Challenges Project hosts workshops introducing students to frontier risks in AI and biosecurity, and maps concrete paths to high-impact careers.

 

Truthful AI

Truthful AI is a research initiative that investigates truthfulness, deception, and emergent misalignment in language models to advance safer AI systems. 

The Centre for AI Security and Access

The Centre for AI Security and Access (CASA) is a newly launched project with a mission to bridge the critical gap between equitable access to AI technologies and essential security considerations. CASA works to ensure that advanced AI systems can be widely and responsibly distributed globally while maintaining appropriate safeguards. Through research and diplomacy, they address coordination challenges in global AI governance while advancing meaningful participation from historically underrepresented regions, particularly Global Majority countries. 

 

Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute

Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute (QURI) is a nonprofit research organization researching forecasting and epistemics to improve the long-term future of humanity. In 2025, the team:

 

Vista Institute for AI Policy

The Vista Institute for AI Policy brings together individuals working at the intersection between law and policy to improve discourse and promote the growth of AI policy as a robust field of study. 

Quotes from project directors 
 

Truthful AI:

Rethink Priorities’ Special Projects team made it possible for Truthful AI to transition effectively from another fiscal sponsor. Without their fiscal sponsorship, we would likely have spent considerable time navigating complex setup processes or trying to secure suitable sponsorship elsewhere – if that had been possible at all. SP’s support enabled us to hire quickly, offer competitive salaries within the AI Safety space, and maintain my visa. The flexibility and operational stability have made a clear difference to our ability to focus on research rather than administration. 
- Owain Evans, Director, Truthful AI


Vista Institute for AI Policy:

Support from the Special Projects Team was essential to establish as well as begin to scale Vista’s programs. We could not have managed all the logistics of fundraising and organizing our first academic workshop without it due to the heavy operational overhead associated with these activities. SP is also responsible for the hiring of our Director of Program Strategy, who has been an immensely impactful team member for us. Vista was able to get more ambitious with its program, knowing that it would have SP support throughout.
- Aishwarya Saxena, Co-Director, Vista Institute for AI Policy


Centre for AI Security and Access (CASA):

Rethink Priorities allowed us to quickly receive tax-exempt funding from our grantors and to hire a research assistant contractor. This enabled us to get up and running quickly and stay focused on our core mission and work.
- Sumaya Nur and Joanna Wiaterek, Directors, Centre for AI Security and Access


Plans for 2026

In 2026, the Special Projects team plans to onboard new projects for fiscal sponsorship, with a primary focus on mitigating risks associated with AI. We also plan to launch another call for new project proposals. While we aren’t actively seeking funding, if you are interested in helping us offer support within this ecosystem, please don’t hesitate to contact us. 
 

Thank you

Thank you for taking the time to read our 2025 Results, 2026 Plans and Funding Needs. Your continued support enables us to deliver high-impact services across global health, animal welfare, and other critical areas.

Together, we can continue to advance evidence-based approaches to create a better future.

With gratitude,
The Rethink Priorities Team


Acknowledgments

Rethink Priorities is a think-and-do tank dedicated to informing decisions made by high-impact organizations, funders, and policymakers across various cause areas. This text is authored by Marcus A. Davis, Kieran Greig, Rickard Vikstrom, and Janique Behman. Thank you to William McAuliffe, John Firth, David Moss, Matthew Fargo, Hannah Tookey, and Whitney Childs for their significant contributions to this text. Thanks also to Sarina Wong for feedback, Urszula Zarosa for feedback and graphic design, and Shane Coburn for copyediting. We utilized an AI editing tool to refine our work, with close supervision to ensure accuracy and tone.
 

  1. ^

     Our core budget excludes our Special Projects program because its financial model is self-financing, and therefore does not need to be included.

  2. ^

    This figure does not include expenses from the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS) that we incubated and which will spin off into a fully separate entity in 2026. To learn more about IAPS’ work, feel free to reach out. 

  3. ^

    This does not include outputs by the special projects we administratively support, but it does include work at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS) that we incubated and which will spin off into a fully separate entity in 2026. To learn more about IAPS’ work, feel free to reach out. 

  4. ^

     This formalizes RP’s existing cross-department resourcing model, providing flexible research, communication, and surge capacity to meet priority needs across programs. It will draw on existing staff and infrastructure rather than new hires, ensuring resources can be allocated dynamically where they are most needed.

  5. ^

    Our core budget excludes expenses from Special Projects themselves.

  6. ^

    This figure does not include expenses from the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS) that we incubated and which will spin off into a fully separate entity in 2026. To learn more about IAPS’ work, feel free to reach out. 

  7. ^

    Not included in this table are our development team, the Special Projects team, or our newly formed cross-cutting team. 

  8. ^

    In addition to the restricted funds listed in this table, RP seeks to hold approximately three months worth of unrestricted funds across the organization. These funds are essential for covering needs across all programs, providing stability, and supporting our ability to respond flexibly to urgent priorities. However, notably, our main institutional funders typically do not provide unrestricted funding.

  9. ^

    We aim to maintain a minimum 12-month runway across all areas to ensure financial stability, enabling us to carry out our mission-driven work even during periods of funding uncertainty or economic downturns. This financial buffer provides the flexibility to strategically plan, adapt, and invest in high-impact programs without the constant pressure of immediate fundraising. It also aligns with our funders' typical annual funding cycles.

  10. ^

    Note that this includes some additional support for our Special Projects. 

  11. ^

     This excludes $150k pledged towards this amount but not yet received.

Joey Bream @ 2025-11-19T14:59 (+1)

Excited about the digital consciousness + farmed insect welare work. Good luck!