# Open Philanthropy **Open Philanthropy** (rebranded as **Coefficient Giving** in November 2025) is the **principal grantmaking foundation of the Effective Altruism movement and the single largest funder of the EA/longtermist institutional ecosystem worldwide**. Founded in 2014 as a joint project of [[GiveWell]] and **[[Good Ventures]]** (the Moskovitz-Tuna family foundation), Open Philanthropy formally separated from GiveWell in 2017 and has operated since then as an independent foundation under the leadership of **Holden Karnofsky** and later **Alexander Berger**. Open Philanthropy is funded almost entirely by [[Dustin Moskovitz]] and [[Cari Tuna]], whose combined Facebook-era fortune (Moskovitz's 7.6% stake at Facebook's 2012 IPO was worth approximately $5 billion at that moment) has underwritten the foundation's approximately **$4 billion in cumulative giving** by mid-2025. The foundation's **2023 AI safety giving alone was approximately $46 million**, making Moskovitz-Tuna functionally the single largest funder of technical AI safety research in the world. Open Philanthropy matters for the KB for three reasons. First, it is the **financial spine of the [[TESCREAL]] institutional ecosystem** — the foundation that funds [[Centre for Effective Altruism]], [[80,000 Hours]], [[Global Priorities Institute]], MIRI, the Centre for the Governance of AI, and dozens of adjacent organizations. Without Open Philanthropy, most of the 2010s-era EA institutions would not exist or would be operating at a fraction of their current scale. Second, the foundation's **concentrated grantmaking in AI safety** is one of the structural reasons why AI safety is a live political and policy concern in the mid-2020s rather than a niche academic subfield — the funding sustains the researcher population, the think tanks, the fellowship programs, and the policy-adjacent organizations that collectively push AI-doom arguments into political discourse. Third, Open Philanthropy's **structural relationship to the broader EA movement** — single-donor-dependent, priority-setting, and operating from inside the movement while simultaneously being its principal funder — is the case study for what critics ([[Émile Torres]], post-FTX EA reformers) describe as a concentration-of-authority problem in contemporary social movements generally. ## Origins: GiveWell (2007) Open Philanthropy's intellectual lineage begins with **GiveWell**, the evidence-based-charity research organization founded in 2007 by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld. GiveWell's innovation was the methodological commitment to quantitatively comparing charities on cost-per-outcome-achieved, publishing detailed public analysis of recipients' evidence bases, and being willing to direct donor attention to the narrow set of charities the analysis found to be most effective. GiveWell's early years produced the now-canonical EA "top charities" list — bed-net distribution (Against Malaria Foundation), deworming (Schistosomiasis Control Initiative), cash transfers (GiveDirectly) — which remain the global-health flagship of the movement. By 2011-2012 GiveWell's analysis had attracted the attention of Moskovitz and Tuna, who were beginning to think systematically about their philanthropic commitments. ## Founding (2014) **Good Ventures** was founded in 2011 as the Moskovitz-Tuna family foundation. Initial giving was directed through GiveWell-identified opportunities. By 2013-2014 the scale of Moskovitz-Tuna's potential giving (billions of dollars over a lifetime) exceeded what GiveWell's then-existing methodology could evaluate — the global health charities GiveWell focused on had absorptive-capacity limits, and Moskovitz-Tuna were interested in potentially higher-leverage cause areas outside GiveWell's conventional scope. The solution was the 2014 founding of **Open Philanthropy** as a joint project of GiveWell and Good Ventures, with Holden Karnofsky leading the new organization while remaining at GiveWell. Open Phil's mandate was broader: to research and fund opportunities across cause areas, including cause areas (AI safety, biosecurity, longtermist priorities) that GiveWell's methodology was not designed to handle. **2017 formal separation**: Open Phil separated from GiveWell as an independent organization, with Karnofsky as President. The separation reflected the full divergence of the two operations — GiveWell continued to focus on evidence-based global health giving, Open Phil expanded aggressively into longtermist cause areas. **November 2025 rebrand**: Open Philanthropy formally rebranded as **Coefficient Giving**, consolidating the various organizational layers (Open Phil, Good Ventures, associated LLC structures) under a cleaner single identity. The name change reflects internal strategic shifts rather than a change in ownership, leadership, or direction. ## Cause Areas and Giving Distribution Open Philanthropy's giving distributes across four broad categories: - **Global health and development**: The evidence-based charity giving descended from the GiveWell origins — bednets, deworming, cash transfers, and related global-poverty interventions. This giving remains substantial (hundreds of millions of dollars cumulative) but has been overtaken in recent years by the growth of other cause areas - **AI safety and technical alignment research**: The largest area of giving growth since ~2016. Recipients include MIRI, Redwood Research, the AI Alignment Forum, academic AI safety groups at major universities, and a range of fellowship programs and policy organizations. **2023 giving in this category was approximately $46 million**, making Open Phil the single largest AI safety funder globally - **Biosecurity and pandemic preparedness**: Another growth area, accelerated after 2020. Funds pandemic-prevention research, biosecurity policy work, and academic appointments - **Longtermist-adjacent policy work**: AI policy, biosecurity policy, existential-risk reduction, and related advocacy Other giving areas include farm animal welfare, criminal justice reform (declining over time), immigration policy, and scientific research (particularly life-science research). **Cumulative giving**: approximately **$4 billion** by mid-2025, with the rate of giving accelerating through the late 2010s and 2020s as Moskovitz-Tuna's commitment to annual giving has matured. ## The EA Movement Spine Open Philanthropy functions as the **financial spine of the Effective Altruism movement**, particularly its longtermist wing. The spine structure: - **Movement infrastructure**: Open Phil funds [[Centre for Effective Altruism]], [[80,000 Hours]], [[Giving What We Can]], EA Funds, the EA Forum, Rethink Priorities, and the operational apparatus through which EA exists as a coherent movement - **Academic legitimation**: Funds academic appointments and research at [[Future of Humanity Institute]] (until its 2024 closure), [[Global Priorities Institute]], Cambridge's [[Centre for the Study of Existential Risk]], and similar programs at other universities - **Career pipeline**: Funds fellowship programs that place EA-aligned researchers in Congressional staff positions, federal agency roles, think tank appointments, and policy-adjacent fellowships — most prominently the **Horizon Institute for Public Service** fellowship program - **Strategic direction**: Because Open Phil's giving is the largest single source of funding for many EA organizations, its cause-area priorities and program-officer judgments substantially shape what the movement as a whole works on The post-2022 **FTX collapse** stress-tested this arrangement. [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] had been positioning himself as a second mega-funder of EA (via FTX Future Fund), promising multi-billion-dollar giving and relieving some of the single-donor dependence on Moskovitz-Tuna. FTX's collapse eliminated that alternative and made Open Phil even more structurally central to the movement's survival. ## Leadership and Governance Open Philanthropy's operational leadership has been: - **Holden Karnofsky**: Co-founder; President 2014-2021; stepped back from day-to-day operations in 2021 to focus on AI safety research and writing (*Cold Takes* blog and associated work) - **Alexander Berger**: Co-CEO from 2021 after Karnofsky's step-back; principal operational lead - **Emily Oehlsen, Eli Rose, Claire Zabel**: Long-term senior staff directing specific cause-area portfolios Board governance includes Moskovitz, Tuna, and independent board members. The operational autonomy of program officers is one of the organization's stated practices — staff researchers are understood to have substantial authority to make grant recommendations within their cause-area portfolios, with final approval from senior leadership and (for very large grants) board-level review. ## Critics and the Concentration Problem Open Philanthropy has been the subject of extensive critical commentary, particularly post-FTX: - **Concentration of authority**: Critics including Émile P. Torres and post-FTX EA community writers argue that the Moskovitz-Tuna funding concentration creates structural alignment between Open Phil priorities and the Moskovitz-Tuna worldview — and, through Open Phil's funding position, between that worldview and the entire EA movement's direction - **Cause-area prioritization**: The shift toward longtermist cause areas (AI safety, existential risk, biosecurity) and away from global health is documented through the foundation's public grant data; critics argue this shift tracks Moskovitz-Tuna preferences or Karnofsky preferences more than the expected-value analysis the foundation's methodology claims - **Political donations distinction**: Open Philanthropy is formally non-partisan and does not make partisan political contributions, but critics note that the foundation's policy-adjacent work (AI policy fellowships, biosecurity policy organizations) has a political character even if not partisan - **Lack of democratic accountability**: The structural argument that any foundation directing billions of dollars of grants is accountable only to its donors (and indirectly to recipient organizations), not to any broader constituency — a critique that applies to Open Phil but also to most major foundations The **[[Leonard Leo]] network**, the **Koch political operation**, and the Moskovitz-Tuna philanthropic operation are structurally similar in their concentrated-funding-shaping-movement dynamics even though their politics differ — a point made frequently in critical EA literature and noted in the Moskovitz entry of this KB. ## Connection to the KB Ecosystem - **[[Dustin Moskovitz]] / [[Cari Tuna]]**: Principal donors; the operation is structurally inseparable from the couple's wealth base. - **[[Holden Karnofsky]]**: Co-founder and long-time president; principal intellectual architect. - **[[Effective Altruism]] / [[Longtermism]] / [[TESCREAL]]**: Open Phil is the institutional financial expression of these frameworks at scale. - **[[Centre for Effective Altruism]] / [[Giving What We Can]] / [[80,000 Hours]]**: Principal grantees; Open Phil-CEA relationship is structurally defining of the EA movement's scale. - **[[Future of Humanity Institute]] (until 2024) / [[Global Priorities Institute]]**: Oxford academic grantees; Open Phil funded Oxford's EA-adjacent academic research programs throughout their existence. - **[[MIRI]] / [[Future of Life Institute]]**: AI safety grantees; Open Phil is a principal funder of both. - **[[Jaan Tallinn]] / SFF**: Adjacent funder at smaller scale; Open Phil and Tallinn's SFF are the two principal vehicles for AI safety funding. - **[[Sam Bankman-Fried]] / FTX**: Pre-collapse, Open Phil shared the EA-funder role with FTX Future Fund; post-collapse, Open Phil is the movement's sole mega-funder. - **AI safety policy ecosystem**: Open Phil-funded fellowships place personnel in Congressional offices, federal agencies, and think tanks — giving the foundation a concrete-if-diffuse role in how AI regulation is developing in Washington. ## See Also - [[Dustin Moskovitz]] - [[Cari Tuna]] - [[Holden Karnofsky]] - [[Centre for Effective Altruism]] - [[Giving What We Can]] - [[80,000 Hours]] - [[Global Priorities Institute]] - [[Future of Humanity Institute]] - [[MIRI]] - [[Future of Life Institute]] - [[Jaan Tallinn]] - [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] - [[Effective Altruism]] - [[Longtermism]] - [[TESCREAL]]