Forethought has room for more funding

By Forethought, MaxDalton @ 2025-11-21T15:42 (+97)

I lead Forethought: we research how to navigate the transition to superintelligent AI, and then help people to address the issues we identify.

I think we might soon be funding constrained, in the sense that we’ll have more people that we’d like to hire than funding to hire them. (We’re currently in the middle of a hiring round. While we’re still evaluating candidates, we’ve been pleasantly pleased with our applicant pool, and we think that we might want to end up making offers to (or offering grants to) more people than we can currently fund.) If we end up in this situation, I think that marginal funding would (in expectation) lead to more good macrostrategy research.

You can see a bit more about the case for donating, budget, impact to date, and plans on our donate page and our 2025 fundraiser page. You can donate here.

Donations are tax-deductible for donors in the US, UK and the Netherlands. For more details on donation methods and tax-deductibility, see here.

Some quick FAQs:

Why haven’t other funders picked this up?

Forethought has been evaluated and endorsed by Longview Philanthropy and Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy), who are pitching us to donors in their network.
Our work is pretty unusual, which means we’re mostly trying to raise money from highly-aligned private donors, who are not giving at a scale where they can easily fill our funding gap.
That said, some of this information is new, so our current donors might be willing to give more, and new donors might chip in. You could be a part of that, though!

What sort of opportunity is this?

I think that this style of work has a strong track record.
I think we have a good team and we have made some significant research progress as well as influenced some important decisions.
As mentioned, Forethought has been endorsed by both Longview and by Coefficient Giving. We also have some testimonials on our donate page, and I think most people who’ve seriously engaged with our work think it’s adding something.
But while I think this is a good bet, it’s a high variance bet: we’re a relatively early-stage organization, our research is quite hits-based, and I think it’s pretty unclear how to BOTEC our work. Additionally, we’re looking for fairly unrestricted support, and our research focuses might change over time.

I’m happy to respond to questions in the comments!

Neel Nanda @ 2025-11-22T13:34 (+57)

Are you able to share why you've been endorsed by OP/Coefficient, to the point that they are recommending you to other donors, but they haven't been able to fill your funding gap via Good Ventures?

MaxDalton @ 2025-11-24T15:08 (+20)

My understanding is that Coefficient remains excited about recommending us to donors, but recently confirmed with Good Ventures that we're not a good fit for Good Ventures' specific preferences at the moment.

I'm afraid that I can't speak to Good Ventures' reasons apart from noting that they evidently didn't change Coefficient's decision to recommend us to their other donors.

Neel Nanda @ 2025-11-28T11:12 (+5)

Seems reasonable, thanks! I feel generally more aligned with Coefficient/OP's judgement than Good Ventures', so seems fine by me

Neel Nanda @ 2025-11-22T13:29 (+9)

I was surprised to see that you are US tax deductible (via every) but not UK tax deductible, given that you are a uk-based charity. I assume this is downstream of different levels of non-profit bureaucracy in the different countries? I would recommend explicitly flagging this early in the post as this is a deal breaking factor for many medium sized donors and if this was a constraint for me, I would have filtered exactly incorrectly

Amrit Sidhu-Brar 🔸 @ 2025-11-24T10:15 (+14)

EDIT 1st Dec 2025: I'm happy to confirm that we can now accept Gift Aid (tax-deductible) donations from the UK, via this page on Giving What We Can's donation platform.

Great nudge, thanks Neel! I've updated the post and webpages to make this clearer now.

Extra notes:

It's likely that we'll have an online platform for allowing UK donors to fund us tax-deductibly / with Gift Aid later this year or in early 2026. If anyone would like to be notified if/when this becomes the case, please fill in this form [link removed].
If anyone would like to make a substantial UK donation, say above £25,000, please do get in touch! Even if we're not able to set up an ongoing route via a public platform, we'll do what we can to facilitate it.

For background: yep, Aleks is correct. We're a not-for-profit company in the UK, but not a UK charity, and as such can't claim Gift Aid on direct UK donations. We do have 501c3-equivalent status allowing US grantors to fund us easily, including Every.org, which collects tax-deductible donations from US individuals, and grants them on to us. And yes, this was a decision made in part because of administrative costs, though we're open to the possibility of becoming a UK charity later if it seems worthwhile.

Amrit Sidhu-Brar 🔸 @ 2025-12-01T17:44 (+11)

I'm happy to confirm that we can now accept Gift Aid (tax-deductible) donations from the UK, via this page on Giving What We Can's donation platform.

NickLaing @ 2025-11-25T08:02 (+6)

it's not that surprising to me. getting Tax free donation status in the US is far easier than most other countries. OneDay Health Charity is registered in New Zealand in primarily with governance based there, and in Uganda as an international NGO, but it's only in the US that people can donate tax deductable through our 501c3 there.....

Aleks_K @ 2025-11-23T12:15 (+5)

Forethought are not a UK charity, they are a UK-based non-profit company (according to the footer of their website). But I agree that flagging that donations from the UK are not gift-aid eligible/tax deductible (and that US donations are) would be good as it might be surprising to many people.

Neel Nanda @ 2025-11-21T23:57 (+9)

Are you happy to receive donations from AGI company employees?

Amrit Sidhu-Brar 🔸 @ 2025-11-24T10:12 (+14)

Hi! We're keeping an eye on how big a portion of our funding comes from AGI company employees, but yes, we're very happy to receive such donations at the current margin, thanks.

(Responding in my capacity as Director of Ops at Forethought.)

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 @ 2025-11-21T16:40 (+2)

BOTEC

Back-of-the-envelope calculation?

Forethought @ 2025-11-21T17:35 (+3)

Yep! We think our work doesn't lend itself easily to coming up with quantitative estimates of our expected impact.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 @ 2025-11-21T17:37 (+2)

Thanks for explaining. :)

Joey Bream🔸 @ 2025-11-21T15:52 (+2)

Completely support this. Please consider making yourselves visible to ARIA if you haven't already https://link.aria.org.uk/cf-li (wrote up a post explaining in more detail if needed)