# Centre for Effective Altruism The **Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA)** is the **central coordinating non-profit for the Effective Altruism movement**, co-founded in 2011 at the University of Oxford by [[William MacAskill]] and [[Toby Ord]]. CEA is the institutional spine of the movement: it is the parent organization (directly or historically) of [[Giving What We Can]], [[80,000 Hours]], EA Funds, the EA Global conference series, the EA Forum, and a range of community-building, grantmaking, and movement-infrastructure operations. Based in Oxford with substantial operations in the Bay Area and London, CEA is substantially funded through [[Open Philanthropy]] (the [[Dustin Moskovitz]]/[[Cari Tuna]] foundation now renamed Coefficient Giving), making it the institutional expression of the Moskovitz-Tuna-funded EA operation at scale. CEA matters for the KB for three reasons. First, it is the **organizational translation of Effective Altruism from a set of philosophical arguments into a coherent, funded, scalable movement** — without CEA's community-building infrastructure, EA would remain a philosophy-department curiosity rather than the Silicon Valley-adjacent political and cultural force it has become. Second, its **post-FTX governance crisis** (2022-2024) is one of the most documented cases of a movement-infrastructure organization attempting to adjudicate its own complicity in a major fraud — [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] had been an EA Global speaker, a movement funder, and a community-endorsed figure, and CEA's handling of the FTX collapse is a running case study in EA community accountability. Third, its **Bay Area presence** — particularly the EA Global conferences that rotate through San Francisco — is the institutional mechanism by which the EA/longtermist intellectual cluster [[TESCREAL]] interfaces with frontier AI labs, a fact with substantive consequences for how AI safety work is funded, staffed, and politically positioned. ## Founding and Early Years (2011-2015) CEA was founded at Oxford in late 2011 by MacAskill and Ord as the umbrella organization that would bring together: - **Giving What We Can** (founded 2009 by Ord and MacAskill) — the pledge community committed to donating 10%+ of lifetime income - **80,000 Hours** (founded 2011 by Benjamin Todd and MacAskill) — the EA-aligned career advising organization - **The Life You Can Save** (founded 2013 by Peter Singer, later spun out) — Singer's organization advancing similar pledge-based giving The founding logic was operational and financial: rather than each early EA project maintaining its own fundraising, legal, and operations staff, a single coordinating organization could absorb those overheads while letting each brand operate with its distinctive community and mission. By 2014 CEA had begun the **EA Global conference series**, which would become the movement's most visible community-building mechanism. The conferences rotated between Oxford, San Francisco, and London, bringing together the dispersed EA community of academic philosophers, [[GiveWell]]-style evidence-based giving advocates, Bay Area Rationalists from the [[LessWrong]] ecosystem, and a growing population of younger people recruited through 80,000 Hours career advising. ## Institutional Structure CEA functions as an **umbrella** with several distinct sub-organizations and programs operating under its legal and financial structure: - **Giving What We Can**: Historically the pledge community; continues to track pledger commitments and publish donation data - **80,000 Hours**: The career-advising operation; produces the 80,000 Hours Job Board, podcast, and research publications - **EA Funds**: A pooled grant-making mechanism that allows smaller donors to contribute to expert-managed EA cause-area funds (long-term future, global health, animal welfare, EA infrastructure) - **EA Global**: The flagship conference series - **EA Forum**: The online discussion venue for the movement, structurally similar to LessWrong - **Community Health**: The CEA team responsible for community governance, disciplinary matters, and cross-organization coordination Through 2023-2024 CEA initiated a **decentralization** effort — spinning 80,000 Hours out as an independent organization (completed 2024), transferring operations of several programs to Effective Ventures, and beginning the process of making Giving What We Can operationally independent. The decentralization was partly motivated by **post-FTX governance concerns** that the concentration of so much movement infrastructure under one legal entity was a single point of failure. ## Funding and the Moskovitz-Tuna Pipeline CEA's operating budget comes principally from [[Open Philanthropy]]. Open Phil grants to CEA have ranged from several million to tens of millions of dollars annually across the late 2010s and 2020s, making Moskovitz-Tuna functionally the movement's principal funder. Additional funding sources include: - **[[Jaan Tallinn]]'s [[Survival and Flourishing Fund]] (SFF)**: secondary-major funder of EA-adjacent operations - **Individual EA community donors**: a long tail of smaller donors, many of them Giving What We Can pledgers - **FTX Future Fund (2022, collapsed)**: provided significant funding in the first half of 2022 before FTX's November collapse rendered those grants reputationally and financially untenable The Open Philanthropy dependence is a recurring topic of internal EA debate. Critics within the community argue that the concentration of funding creates structural alignment between CEA's priorities and Open Phil's priorities; defenders argue that Open Phil is unusually deferential and that CEA retains substantive autonomy. ## The FTX Collapse and Its Aftermath The November 2022 collapse of [[Sam Bankman-Fried]]'s FTX cryptocurrency exchange triggered the most significant governance crisis in CEA's history. SBF had: - Been a high-profile EA community figure for years, including speaking at EA Global - Founded the FTX Future Fund in early 2022, pledging to direct billions of dollars into EA causes - Recruited prominent EA figures (including Will MacAskill) into FTX Future Fund advisory roles - Publicly described his wealth-accumulation strategy as a form of **"earning to give"** — the EA doctrine, originally articulated by Ord and MacAskill, that high-earning careers can be morally superior to direct-service careers because they enable larger charitable giving When FTX collapsed in November 2022 — revealing that customer funds had been transferred to SBF's trading firm Alameda Research, that multiple billions of dollars were missing, and that SBF and other executives had committed large-scale fraud — the EA community was thrust into a reckoning: - MacAskill publicly stated he had been deceived by SBF and had believed FTX Future Fund's money was legitimate - CEA and the FTX Future Fund advisors resigned en masse - A wave of internal EA forum discussion, blog posts, and external press coverage debated whether EA's structural culture (consequentialist ethics, effective-altruism logic applied to career choice, celebration of billionaire donors) had produced SBF as a predictable rather than anomalous outcome The FTX episode is a permanent element of CEA's institutional history. The post-2022 governance reforms — the decentralization of sub-organizations, explicit governance-review processes, and ongoing debate about the movement's relationship to high-wealth donors — all trace in part to the FTX reckoning. ## Critics and Controversies Beyond FTX, CEA has been the subject of ongoing critical commentary: - **Concentration of authority**: Émile P. Torres, [[Timnit Gebru]], and a number of EA-community writers have argued that CEA's Moskovitz-dependent funding structure and close leadership ties between CEA, 80,000 Hours, and Open Philanthropy create an accountability problem distinct from FTX - **Cause-area bias**: Critics both inside and outside EA argue that CEA has progressively shifted the movement's priorities toward AI safety / longtermism and away from the global health / poverty giving that brought many people into EA in the first place — a shift documented through funding patterns, conference agendas, and 80,000 Hours career recommendations - **Bay Area culture adjacency**: The Bay Area EA community's overlap with the Rationalist / LessWrong community, and through that community with more contested political cultures (including the [[The Dark Enlightenment]] / neoreactionary milieu that surfaced around [[Peter Thiel]]-adjacent figures), is a recurring topic of critical commentary The **TESCREAL critique** (Torres/Gebru) names CEA as the principal institutional expression of the EA and L components of the TESCREAL bundle — the organizational apparatus through which the movement's philosophical claims have been legitimated, funded, and propagated. ## Connection to the KB Ecosystem - **[[Effective Altruism]]**: CEA is the movement's central coordinating organization; the ideology's institutional expression. - **[[Longtermism]] / [[TESCREAL]]**: CEA's post-2015 prioritization of AI safety and longtermist cause areas is the institutional vector through which these frameworks have been funded at scale. - **[[Giving What We Can]] / [[80,000 Hours]]**: Legacy sub-organizations; both operate as EA recruiting mechanisms. - **[[Open Philanthropy]] / [[Dustin Moskovitz]] / [[Cari Tuna]]**: Principal funder; the structural financial relationship that makes CEA's scale possible. - **[[Sam Bankman-Fried]]**: Former high-profile EA community figure; the FTX collapse is the movement's most significant governance crisis. - **[[Toby Ord]] / [[William MacAskill]]**: Co-founders; principal intellectual architects. - **[[Future of Humanity Institute]] / [[Global Priorities Institute]]**: Academic institutional partners at Oxford; the philosophy-department legitimation apparatus for EA-aligned research. - **[[LessWrong]]**: Adjacent community; substantial early EA recruitment came through LessWrong readers; the two communities' Bay Area presences are substantially overlapping. - **[[MIRI]]**: Early EA organizations — including MIRI's predecessor Singularity Institute — were funded and staffed from within the EA/Rationalist ecosystem that CEA coordinates. ## See Also - [[Effective Altruism]] - [[Longtermism]] - [[TESCREAL]] - [[William MacAskill]] - [[Toby Ord]] - [[Dustin Moskovitz]] - [[Open Philanthropy]] - [[Giving What We Can]] - [[80,000 Hours]] - [[Global Priorities Institute]] - [[Future of Humanity Institute]] - [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] - [[LessWrong]] - [[MIRI]]